MediaTek has gotten much better. Yeah, my mt7621u wifi craps out a couple times a day and has to be usbreset. But in general, I think MediaTek and Qualcomm are both at B- and moving in the right direction.
This is one market, not a total picture, but looking at what OpenWRT supports is some kind of indicator. MediaTek really showed up in force for Wifi 6. Very very few 802.11ax systems were hackable, try as we might. But a bunch of very affordable pretty well performing MediaTek access points showed up early, & only more and more have been made available since.
I wish I had a real source of real information on what's forcing the bad old dirty shitty don't give a fuck world to reform into people who actually want their chips to be usable, who appreciate that having your shit upstreamed into mainline is the only way your crap isn't immediately rotting on the vine from day 0. Google's Chromebooks seemed to have had some influence, created a uniquely strong pressure to do the right thing; MediaTek seems like they've kind of had to pass the gauntlet on this, & become something more than they might have otherwise been. One of the best act's Google's ever done, having a Chromebook team that has driven hard for getting the heck out of vendor hell. Meanwhile, the Android team has the Google Kernel Image, excuse me, Generic Kernel Image (Generic Google Kernel Image at best!) to specifically enable everyone to never have to upstream their support ever again, from what it looks like (because Google will maintain a userland driver layer hitting Google APIs so folks can just ignore actual kernel support forever).
This is one market, not a total picture, but looking at what OpenWRT supports is some kind of indicator. MediaTek really showed up in force for Wifi 6. Very very few 802.11ax systems were hackable, try as we might. But a bunch of very affordable pretty well performing MediaTek access points showed up early, & only more and more have been made available since.
I wish I had a real source of real information on what's forcing the bad old dirty shitty don't give a fuck world to reform into people who actually want their chips to be usable, who appreciate that having your shit upstreamed into mainline is the only way your crap isn't immediately rotting on the vine from day 0. Google's Chromebooks seemed to have had some influence, created a uniquely strong pressure to do the right thing; MediaTek seems like they've kind of had to pass the gauntlet on this, & become something more than they might have otherwise been. One of the best act's Google's ever done, having a Chromebook team that has driven hard for getting the heck out of vendor hell. Meanwhile, the Android team has the Google Kernel Image, excuse me, Generic Kernel Image (Generic Google Kernel Image at best!) to specifically enable everyone to never have to upstream their support ever again, from what it looks like (because Google will maintain a userland driver layer hitting Google APIs so folks can just ignore actual kernel support forever).