Haven't had a single crash since I switched back. I'm gonna switch to the newer version again to see if the build was actually at fault, and not the Nvidia drivers and/or linux-firmware, both which I've received updates for since.
The thread's just someone requesting ArenaNet to have a native implementation. If that would happen, it'll most likely work through Wine out-of-the-box.
The performance gains would unlikely be significant, except on extremely weak GPUs, since the game is so CPU-bound for the most part. That'd apply to both Windows, and running the game via Wine.