I agree; 2016-17 was about the turning point. I bought a Fury X around then, and it was flawless back then. In contrast, my old nvidia cards had become unusable.

On the AMD, FreeSync and HDMI audio didn't work at first. (For any card; the driver documentation said those features were a work in progress.)

Anyway, I unplugged it for a year or so, and recently plugged it back in. One apt get upgrade later FreeSync and HDMI audio just work.

It's gotten to the point where I'd opt for an ARM laptop over one without AMD or intel graphics. From what I can tell suspend resume doesn't work on intel CPUs (on windows or linux), so it's basically AMD GPU or no x86 at from a compatibility perspective. (Did AMD also eliminate S3 suspend, and not replace it with a working alternative?)

Just bought a 6600XT, and it's been great.

Literally just plugged it in and installed the driver packages I didn't on initial setup, on most distros it would've literally been plug and play.

I also had a HD 7850, and though I had pushed it less than you I never noticed any huge issues.

It was in a uniquely terrible position of being one of the last cards released supported by radeon when all the development had moved to amdgpu, which it supposedly could run if you jumped through the right hurdles. I remember the xorg feature table having several things working for older and newer models but not the 7850.

Still, my experience with it led to another AMD card that I've also been quite happy with.

About them being buggy, I won't discuss. But you didn't have to do anything to even get them installed.