It used to be that there was no option at all, on any distro. You’d have the broken proprietary drivers, or the open source reverse engineered one with half the performance and unreliability in specialty features.

Since then Nvidia has shifted focus to get their drivers working properly, and there were also changes making them more open source, tho I’m not sure that’d mean the “proprietary driver” will go full foss at some point.

If op is to be believed, the proprietsry driver is already a lot more stable, so it’s now a software licensing issue not an unfixable technical issue.