While there's very few cards that are officially supported, I've enabled most RDNA 1 and RDNA 2 GPUs in the OS-provided packages on Debian Unstable and Ubuntu 23.10. I haven't tested all of them, but my experience has been that they generally work quite well. The version of HIP packaged for Debian is still a few versions behind, so we haven't been able to enable RDNA 3 yet, but it shouldn't be too long before that is resolved.
As you have described, it has been a very long road to get to this point (with a lot of mistakes along the way), but I think things are getting better. That said, I work on ROCm, so my evaluation may be unintentionally biased.
Hopefully. Although I haven't programmed with it yet, the latest ROCm looks nice (at least from reading the docs). Now all you have to do is actually get to a point where it's actually supported on hardware people actually own and convince people that it's worth investing their time in, and then AMD can start making progress.
The second big problem is that AMD has a history of abandoning APIs. While Nvidia has been focusing on CUDA from the start, AMD is on its third or fourth API. A lot of developers got burned early on by putting in a lot of effort into supporting AMD cards, only to have their work become useless as AMD dropped old API.
So if you wanted to support AMD today you have to choose between using their latest API which is currently only supported on a handful of their latest top end cards, or using their previous API, which is much worse and may or may not be supported in 2 years time.