Generally speaking, buying outright is always cheaper than renting, because you can always continue to run the device potentially for years, or sell it to reclaim some capital.

have an ASUS TUF A15 laptop with an nVidia GTX 1650Ti graphics card and I am SO sick of 500MB driver “updates” that are basically beta tests that break one thing or another. What are the chances of upgrading to a Raedon/AMD graphics card? Or am I stuck with this shit?

in a laptop? practically none. there are some very rare 'laptops' out there - really chonk tops - that have full size desktop gpu's inside them. the vast majority, on the other hand, will have 'mobile' versions of these gpus that are basically permanently connected to the laptop's motherboard (if not being on the mobo itself).

one example of a laptop with a full-size gpu (legacy, these aren't sold anymore): https://www.titancomputers.com/Titan-M151-GPU-Computing-Laptop-workstation-p/m151.htm note the THICK chassis - that's what you need to hold a desktop gpu.

In my experience, AMD is not more reliable on updates. I had to clean install trice to be able to have my RX 6600 function properly and months later, I have a freezing issue that may be caused by my GPU.

You could use an separate external gpu if you have thunderbolt ports. It's not cheap and you sacrifice some performance but worth it for the flexibility in my opinion. Check out https://egpu.io/

Don’t hold your breath, buddy

AMD is absolutely cutting it!! They may not get DLSS or ray trace as well but their cards still kick ass