I hear ya and have recently been scaling-back my personal use of Ubuntu. I am a long-time Debian user for servers (since around the time potato was released), but always found it far too “long in the tooth” for use on a desktop. When Ubuntu first came out, it filled that gap perfectly and it was always my recommendation to people that wanted/needed to use Linux and needed it to “just work”. This is especially the case with laptops. However, times have changed and vanilla Debian is actually a viable distro as long as you are not on the bleeding edge hardware-wise and/or don’t want/need the very latest desktop software.

For my personal desktop, I’ve actually been using Linux Mint since around the time Ubuntu switched to Unity. From the moves Mint has been making lately, it seems that they are also wary of Canonical (i.e. having to revert things like snap out of their Ubuntu base). Mint has always been hedging their bets through their LMDE release, so I would not be surprised if they cut over vanilla Debian as their base sometime soon. I have LMDE on some older machines and it works great (they are still based on bullseye, last I checked).