Things have improved a lot in the 11 years since Linus made that statement. For the most part Nvidia drivers just work. They have even released some opensource drivers fairly recently that will go a long way to making things even better, especially for the existing OSS drivers.

But they are still not perfect. They do keep doing their own thing for years before finally giving up and doing what everyone else is. The latest of which was the EGL Streams API nvidia created for wayland where everyone else was using GBM APIs which forced many window managers and applications to have to explicitly support nvidia drivers. But they have now switched to GBM like everything else (though last I heard their implementations were far from bug-free, things have likely improved since then those as that was over a year ago now).

Nvidia cards are mostly working fine these days as long as you're not using Wayland. If you're using Wayland, be prepared to encounter lots of minor annoyances, and perhaps some bugs that completely break your workflow depending what you're using Linux for (e g. on server you don't have to deal with sleep issues, but in desktop it's an annoyance while on laptop it might be a deal breaker).