They run them through QA at least and work directly with Nvidia to fix any issues they notice. They dont catch everything of course but its still good.
Funny enough, popos ships with version 475, which is ancient. You still want to upgrade to 525 if you want Vulkan 1.3 support; I.e for bottles gaming, which needs Vulkan 1.3
It updates to the latest immediately. I shut down my laptop (the one with nVidia) but I'm fairly certain the driver was 530+. I know it was 527 not so long ago. All you have to do is your regularly scheduled "sudo apt upgrade".
How is it for dualbooting with Win11?
Currently on OpenSuse Leap(on a separate hdd) because many linux recommendation articles suggested that it had the best out of box support for Nvidia n secure boot.
But debian/ubuntu-based systems do have the advantage of being popular. More tutorials n packages readily available.
I think I've read that Ubuntu also supports nvidia drivers, but I had read that snap is polarising, with some people saying that it slows down the startup.