It's easy to criticize the chosen trade-offs, but I would argue that Linux would actually be in worse shape today if it had taken the driver ABI approach and encouraged proprietary drivers. Many drivers originally upstreamed in the 32-bit x86 era would no longer be usable on amd64 had they been 32-bit proprietary drivers, and a good number of 64-bit proprietary drivers would be useless on ARM platforms like the Raspberry Pi.

There are a lot of old computers in research laboratories running Windows XP because some proprietary driver for some important piece of equipment (like a mass spectrometer) doesn't have a 64-bit version.