When automagic hasn't been mucked up with proprietary driver blacklisting and manual configuration, automagic usually does the job automagically. IOW, put an AMD card in a previously empty PCIe slot in an Intel gfx motherboard, and the system can be expected to use an appropriate AMD driver without any user input. Same goes for removing an AMD card and putting in a GeForce card, as long as it isn't too new to be supported by an installed modesetting or nouveau driver.

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Sorry to be a bit slow but I see that a graphics card was installed, followed by drivers, then the lead to the monitor was plugged into the motherboard? Did I miss where this is a laptop?

yes, the manual way where one actually understands what's going on through troubleshooting & taking appropriate measures.

Nah, there is not a cross distro way to do this, because some distroes are more or less fully dependent on the distro management tools to do anything. But in real life, everything is actually very simple and works the same way in any distro, regardless of the weirdnesses of any distro.

You have to understand the core of what is going on, and then adapt your approach to whatever distro you are using. This is one reason I do not like distroes like Ubuntu or Fedora, where everything is pretty much done in their own way, and if you do things manually, there is a big risk you will break the system even if you do it correctly.

I don't like this integrated type of approach. For me (both practically and philosophically) the disadvantages far outweigh the advantages.

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It's a desktop computer. By plugging into the motherboard I meant the ports for integrated graphics at the back panel. Sorry about the confusion.

What I'm getting from this is that the proprietary Nvidia driver does not conform with how the built-in drivers (not sure if drivers is the correct term, but I'll call them that because that's the only word I got) do their thing, and instead imposes its own way of doing things by blacklisting etc. Okay, let's give them that. But is there any way like for example have 2 different configurations, 1 for defaults and another for Nvidia, and maybe on the grub menu allow me to pick between them so Linux can do a boot process for the appropriate driver+hardware?

Again, I'm only asking because I didn't encounter this problem on Windows. Even now, I still haven't bothered to uninstall the Nvidia driver there, but it was still able to get to the graphical desktop anyway. That makes my pov default to "Linux can also do something like that", unless someone who knows better tells me it's not possible because such and such. If it is indeed doable, I want to ask here how, so if it happens to be within my ability, I bother to do it on my computer. Sorry for the long winded post.