I guess the other post was removed so I couldn't continue the convo there. A few people said Sunshine worked great for them with their Nvidia cards and I've actually lost sleep over my issues.

I'm running Bazzite on a fairly new custom build with a RTX 2060S. Someone else said they used a RTX 40 series GPU so maybe my hardware is just too old. Still everything worked great in Windows (same machine) including streaming. I'm willing to try another OS but I don't know if I can deal with another new GPU because it'd be my 3rd and I hate the hassle of selling stuff online.

A key thing I've seen is that the vainfo command reports no encoding capabilities at all. I've never seen any other reports online where someone showed an Nvidia card that could encode according to vainfo. I can absolutely encode using ffmpeg though which is why I'm even more frustrated.