That’s not how I read it at all

By supporting work on a freelance basis for these topics, Valve enables us to work on them without being limited solely by the free time of our volunteers.

Seems pretty explicit to me. Valve is allowing some arch linux contributors to work freelance for valve and get paid money to work on the things they would otherwise be working on for free. This allows these contributors to spend much more time working on these things because they can treat this work as the-thing-I-do-to-put-food-in-my-mouth rather than something extra they would do on the scraps of time they have on the side.

SDL provides a way to override the lib even if it’s statically linked https://github.com/libsdl-org/SDL/blob/main/docs/README-dynapi.md

Yeah that’s fair. My memory is bad, but I think I remember installing the Radeon driver a long time ago. But then again, I’ve been using the AMDGPU driver for basically as long as I can remember. Must have been after 2015 then, or maybe I simply didn’t notice the bad per of the Radeon driver because I was coming from iGPUs so it was still an upgrade.

In any case, the amd hardware story has been good for several years now

Been using AMD and arch for like a decade, and I don’t remember of any major issues of note.

The only exception is with some issues related to my old 1700x which caused Bluetooth issues and OS freezes sometimes. Zero issues since switching to a 3700