>Last time I looked, it was perfectly possible to install them directly, without support by the distro. Yes, it's more work.

Yes, you can install them and they will break with every single update and you need to re-install them. And you will encounter bugs that no-one has any idea why they are there and no-one will help you with.

>There's an open source driver, nouveau, but of course it's behind the newest hardware.

It's not just behind, it's actively sabotaged by nvidia by locking basic hardware functions behind closed firmware that it encrypted.