On the negative: Realtek maintains a driver fork for each chipset variant they shipped despite the differences between variants in the same family often being very minor, and they breed new variants like rabbits so there are probably 30+ drivers in circulation. Realtek only releases their drivers to their paying-for-support customers (end-users are not their customers) so end-users have to rely on board/device vendors sharing them; over time things generally leak to GitHub but it results in 500+ repos with slightly different versions of the same "posted once and never updated again" driver being available to confuse people. There is a large amount of common boilerplate/duplicated code in each vendor driver, and while the vendor drivers generally work okay the overall code quality is low as the drivers have never been subjected to any serious peer review during development. Frequent minor changes to upstream kernel frameworks frequently result in all the drivers breaking and needing to be patched so the drivers are a pain in the arse to maintain over time. The fact the drivers are released with a GPL license is good, but that's about the only good thing to report. Distro maintainers loathe these drivers.
On the positive: Realtek have finally embraced upstreaming their drivers and are now contributing-to and maintaining a single driver per chip family. However their primary interest is in PCI/USB drivers and the SDIO ones are often forgotten, and this is a relatively recent development so they are only investing time/effort into the latest chipsets that nobody is really using yet, not the older chipsets that are endemic. They do comment on patches for older chipsets/drivers when asked, but community developers are the primary source of development for the older chipsets. So future support looks better, but support for everything shipped in the last decade is still a bit sucky.
I'm not sure why the Realtek driver is flagged as staging in Debian (something for Debian maintainers to explain) but I am 100% confident this is the legacy Realtek vendor driver and not the upstream kernel staging driver.