I installed Linux Mint three days ago. Nvidia drivers got installed automatically and I was able to load up steam and play right away. No idea what this meme is talking about
Once I had an issue on Arch (btw): updated somehow during a repo update and did not get the same version for all Nvidia packages (the 32 bit lib was missing). Took me a while to figure that out back then. I eventually downgraded and skipped that driver version until the next update.
I remember it being like that already in 2014. The only thing especially annoying I remember was having to use optimus to manually switch between the "internal" Intel GPU and the dedicated Nvidia GPU to not run out of battery within an hour. But the whole set up thing was never an issue for me on Mint and Ubuntu even 10 years ago.