I think your suggestion makes a lot of sense. Reading the documentation, I think ChronosJ and myself have reached a similar conclusion.
But was it a good idea?
I can only repeat: What are the Nvidia Devs doing in their offices?
Are they using ChatGPT to write their code?
I can't speak to that. Honestly, I'd be surprised if there were no vibe coding going on. I've mentioned before having a friend experienced enough to use CoPilot to get a bit of code and straighten it out properly while others they work with use it and just make more work in code review when they don't know to/how to fix it. The pressure to say "I'm using AI and it's making me more productive!" is huge where I work, and it can only be greater at Nvidia.
That said... unhelpful as it is, 580s have worked great for me. All of my problems this year have been 570 or proprietary rather than the MIT/GPL version of the driver. I'm not saying that to diminish ChronosJ's trouble. Different hardware, different use case, different results. I'm confident in one thing though: throughout the entire tech sector right now, testing is inadequate. It's true in games, it's true in general Windows functionality, and it's true in drivers, as we see here.
Nvidia has been investing heavily in OpenAI, and OpenAI is one of their biggest customers for chips.
Yes--though even if they had no investment in actual AI developers, so much of their profit comes from AI chips the top wants to hear everyone saying how great it is anyway.
It looks like 535 is still getting security updates until next June. Maybe I'll look into that one later. 
I hope companies realize "AI" is not working out soon. Its primary feature is hallucinating..
535 was a bust, but there's a small sliver of hope: it occurred to me that 550 was made functional by forcing Xorg, and I saw in the notes for 580 that it added Wayland support.
My short-term test on Wayland with 580 is good (start game, quit game, suspend, resume, start game, switch desktop to Firefox, switch to third workspace to file explorer, view pictures, and then check for game black screen back on first desktop).
On 580 with xorg, that led to an extremely reliable crash/black screen, but not on 580 with wayland. We'll see how the long-term test/gaming session goes today.
Fingers crossed..
"offices?" that is so 20th Century.
Working from Home/Beach/Golf Course...
No, I assure you, tech industry executives are very adamant about return to office mandates. >_<
After half a decade working from home, I was dragged back, and it's a very uniform situation in the sector.
Gotta keep those Gas Sales up.
60 miles a day, to waste 1.5 to 2 hours a day, and for no more or better work. So damn tired.
After a few hours of 580 still not crashing in a couple of sessions, I think it's good.
If anyone else is struggling with 580 crashes and you were using 550 with Xorg, try changing to Wayland.
If you hard disabled Wayland and forgot where it was, the option was near the top in
sudo nano /etc/gdm3/custom.conf
Then, make sure you select Wayland at the login screen through the Gear icon after you've selected the user, but before you type in the password.
I was having trouble with Wayland's idiosyncrasies, and either it or 580 made the 3080 TI (notebook) overheat for no reason, but I figured out that 535 from the software updater will work on Xorg with both my 3080 and 4070, it just needed the corresponding dkms module to be manually installed. (The software updater only installed the driver and not dkms)
After purging the existing 580 drivers, I did:
sudo apt install nvidia-driver-535 nvidia-dkms-535
And I happily went back to Xorg with both functional games and security updates for now.