> Intel drivers should be good as well, since they use the same Mesa code base.
They use the same front end but that says very little about the quality of the overall driver. Performance is mostly determined by the shader compiler and other hardware-specific parts which obviously differ between Intel and AMD.
The days of Nvidia proprietary drivers being a safe bet is long gone. Especially for any sort of Wayland desktop, but it still applies to X11.
Intel drivers should be good as well, since they use the same Mesa code base.
With the ROCm stuff no longer depending on AMD Pro then there is not going to be any reason to step away from the default GPU drivers provided by your distro, provided they are relatively new.
While I am sure that there are still going to be professional-grade proprietary apps that recommend Nvidia... for most of us the only reason to actually go and choose Nvidia on Linux is because of CUDA. And, personally, I would rather lease time on the cloud or have a second GPU work horse PC separate from my desktop for that.
Unfortunately Nvidia is, by far, the most popular option for Windows users. Over 4:1 ratio according to Steam statistics.
So most new Linux users are still going to have to suffer through dealing with their GPU drivers.