For a LONG time, the conventional wisdom was to shun the packages provided by Nvidia (as well as AMD in the proprietary FGLRX days) in favor of distro packages. These hardware companies used to ship distro-agnostic installers which would install the drivers and tweak the config files once, but they did not integrate with the package manager at all, and would inevitably break the next time you update your OS. The only way to use these drivers reliably was for distro maintainers to re-package them.

Nowadays, AMD support is automatic (built into the kernel / Mesa3D), and Nvidia actually hosts their own package repositories instead of just a self-destructing installer. You should still prefer a distro package if its available, but the knee-jerk "never download the Nvidia driver from Nvidia" advice is not as true as it used to be.