Debian fell out of favor because stable is too damned stale and ubuntu had a lot of small polish and quality of life improvements that debian didn't have at the time.
I used ubuntu for years, but finally gave up on it when they started pushing snaps hard. I'm on PopOS now now but I'll go to mint debian edition or something else if I have to.
Right, stable being a couple years out of date near the end of the lifecycle is somewhat annoying. I feel like the Docker world probably made people care less about this; it's rarely the Linux kernel that prevents your application from running (but Node/Python runtimes are a huge problem). But for desktop stuff people read a blog post about some new feature and want it today, which is a problem when the priority is stability. So I can see that being annoying for the average end user that's not looking for a server OS.
I compromise and install most of the software I use on a daily basis from Homebrew. So I have some crufty version of `ls`, but the latest version of Emacs.
