Backslash

It's important in science (but also in general) to verify things that are thought to be obvious or "common sense", since not everything that the broad public agrees on is true after all.

It was underpowered when the Switch released, yes, but I'd wager that it was a good choice for the application when Nintendo started designing the Switch. Couple that with the (not unreasonable IMO) expectation that there would be successors to the X1 that they could hypothetically put into the Switch and release a higher-perf revision with minimal changes, I can see why they chose it. Unfortunately, Nvidia dropped the X1 line and that (again, purely speculative) scenario never manifested.

The heavy stuff would be things like shader compilation and state management for multiple different graphics APIs (OpenGL and Vulkan mostly).

AFAIK Linux graphics drivers are usually separated into a userspace and a kernel space component, like amdgpu on the kernel side and RADV/RadeonSI within Mesa on the userspace side. So you do not need to do a full reboot to e.g. benefit from performance optimizations within Mesa to get things like faster shader compilation or more efficient draw call submission, which I think most people care about when doing driver updates. In fact you don't even need to soft reboot, because once Mesa is updated, all following uses of it already run the new version, all without a reboot. However if your GPU is not yet supported by the kernel side, then Mesa is of no use to you.

That being said, yes the kernel side is a very important part of the driver, but it's such a low-level driver that very few people would be able to do much of anything with it, which is why I made that distinction.

Yes they do, Mesa being one. Only the close to the metal stuff and Kernel-DRM is handled in kernel space, most of the heavy stuff is done in user space.

To be fair™ they did at least do a little bit to deal with the existing answers becoming obsolete by changing the default answer sorting. The "new" (it's already been at least a year IIRC) sorting pushes down older answers and allows newer answers to rise to the top with fewer votes. That still doesn't fix the issue that the accepted answer likely won't change as new ways of doing things become standard, but at least it's a step in the right direction.

I think rsync is short for remote sync

Yes they're usually called " Display". IIRC Display variants are optimized to be used on digital displays (usually on the web), where a lower resolution (72ish DPI) than printing (~300 DPI) is quite common.