Not sure what you looked at, but I see quite a rapid progress of bug fixes: https://www.gamingonlinux.com/wiki/Mesa_Broken
Never had problems with vlc or mpv on AMD. It works just fine with vaapi. If anything munges the console, it's Nvidia blob which doesn't even support framebuffer.
Also, it sounds like you aren't using Mesa, but use AMD closed stack instead. Don't do that. In short, if you want a stable experience - AMD is way ahead of Nvidia.
This is true, but needs a caveat: a lot of work has gone into improving Mesa and the rest of the Linux graphics stack recently and it's now pretty much caught up (performance-wise) to the proprietary AMD drivers. However, that's only happened in the past 6 months or so, so if you're not using a rolling-release distro like Arch or Gentoo you might still be better off with the proprietary drivers until your distro catches up.
Similar for the steam statistics on linux, AMD just doesn't compete on anything that pushes the GPU on linux. Even things like vlc, mplayer, plex, and friends often get the AMD GPUs in a wonky mode.
The problems I most often see is new windows fail to map, I just get a black window. Presumably something to do with memory allocations of the backing store. It's also frequently munges the console so I can't get to text mode to unwedge the AMD GPU.
So generally if you what a stable linux box I'd recommend nvidia or intel GPUs. Things just work, you can easily have month long uptimes, and things don't freak just because you are playing 1080P video full screen. No pixel droppings, no failing to map, console always works, etc.