I've always described Nvidia as an accelerated compute company that happens to sell hardware.

AMD are smart, and they solve big problems in ways that are baffling to many. They're very sensitive to moats and position themselves with products or frameworks to drain them.

I consider their primary product "engineering competence as a service", but when no one external picks up the reigns, they don't try very hard to play market maker. I remember when Intel's R&D budget was more than AMD's market cap– they're effective both at and when running lean.

The reality here is that people don't have grievances with CUDA and Nvidia aren't doing anything egregious with it. But whether that's due to ROCm's existence... we can only speculate.