I am not familiar with manufacturers trends.
Been googling around there seems to be a lot of ‘don’t buy from this manufacturer’
Particularly on Reddit where there seems a lot of venom against ASUS and to a lesser degree Gigabyte.
Should I avoid these brands … and only consider ASRock or MSI, or are they all good makes.
It can vary considerably with the CPU socket. Also whether you're looking in the high-, mid- or low-end of the market.
In AM4 boards Asus is generally considered to make a terrific high and ultra-high end board but their mid-market boards are lacking in features (like exposing all essential voltages and temperatures for monitoring) which you can find even in other mfr.'s low-end lines. But you'll also pay for them as Asus commands premium prices.
But also, now that the CPU and chipset SOC's have taken over so many functions the drama of older boards has been remarkably tempered in that you see much more closely balanced performance across all mfr's and comparable lines. Even VRM's present far fewer problems, mainly because today's CPU's have so little overclocking headroom but also because almost all modern CPU's and VRM controllers have robust built-in safety protections. There are way fewer occurances of people literaly burning up their mid or low-end board when pushing it too hard.
I think the biggest problem is how mfr's handle BIOS updates, which seems to be even more risky than it used to be, if that were possible. Asrock is the quirkiest, along with MSI in their 300 and 400 series motherboards in particular. And updating BIOS is essential in today's world, with new CPU-level threats that require a microcode update to mitigate coming along with alarming frequency. So the old maxim of "don't update unless you have a problem to fix" doesn't work anymore.
Otherwise, the only mfr. to absolutely avoid in my opinion are one of the no-name Chinese boards that filter onto some of the online stores from time to time. You have absolutely no idea what you are getting when you buy one, and even less idea what info it's sending back home for monitoring.