That was my experience, Nvidia Optimus (which is what allows dynamic switching between the integrated and dedicated GPU in laptops) was completely broken (as in a black screen, not just crashes or other issues) for several years, and Nvidia didn't care to do anything about it.
Yeah, Optimus was a huge PITA. I remember fighting with workarounds like bumblebee and prime for years. Also Nvidia dragged their feet on Wayland support for a few years too (and simultaneously was seemingly intent on sabotaging Nouveau).
I tried bumblebee again recently, and it works shockingly well now. I have a thinkpad T530 from 2013 with an NVS5400m.
There is some strange issue with some games where they don't get full performance from the dGPU, but more than the iGPU. I have to use optirun to get full performance.
It also has problems when the computer wakes from sleep. For whatever reason, hardware video decoding doesn't work after entering standby. Makes steam in home streaming crash on the client, but flipping to software decoding usually works fine.
The important part is that battery life is almost as good with bumblebee as it is with the dGPU turned off. No more fucking with Prime or rebooting into BIOS to turn the GPU back on.
My guess: something like laptop GPU switching failed badly in the nvidia binary, earning it a reputation.