I love Debian. I've bounced around distros a lot, for various reasons, but I'll always have a soft spot for Debian.
The problem with reputations — both in terms of Linux distros and just in general — is that they tend to reflect conventional wisdom from 10-20 years ago. Sometimes that conventional wisdom was off-base from the start, and sometimes it's just outdated.
Like, "Debian is hard" and "Ubuntu is great for beginners". That was true enough 20 years ago. But today, not really.
My last distro-hop was to Bazzite because Debian didn't have the latest GPU drivers that I needed (Debian 13 "Trixie" does now, btw). It was just bad timing that I upgraded to a brand-new GPU toward the end of Debian 12's life cycle. If I'd waited another 6 months (or if I didn't need good OpenCL/ROCm/Vulkan performance) I probably would've stuck with Debian.
I'm fine on Bazzite, but I feel like if I ever hop again, it'll be back to Debian. Now that I am comfortable with DistroBox, I won't worry so much about older application packages in Debian repos; if push comes to shove I'll just run it in a Fedora box or something like that. Drivers are the only thing to worry about, and I'm not likely to upgrade my GPU again for 5+ years so I should be fine.
You'll think I'm crazy, and you're not wrong, but: sneakernet.
Every time I run the numbers on cloud providers, I'm stuck with one conclusion: shit's expensive. Way more expensive than the cost of a few hard drives when calculated over the life expectancy of those drives.
So I use hard drives. I periodically copy everything to external, encrypted drives. Then I put those drives in a safe place off-site.
On top of that, I run much leaner and more frequent backups of more dynamic and important data. I offload those smaller backups to cloud services. Over the years I've picked up a number of lifetime cloud storage subscriptions from not-too-shady companies, mostly from Black Friday sales. I've already gotten my money's worth out of most of them and it doesn't look like they're going to fold anytime soon. There are a lot of shady companies out there so you should be skeptical when you see "lifetime" sales, but every now and then a legit deal pops up.
I will also confess that a lot of my data is not truly backed up at all. If it's something I could realistically recreate or redownload, I don't bother spending much of my own time and money backing it up unless it's, like, really really important to me. Yes, it will be a pain in the ass when shit eventually hits the fan. It's a calculated risk.
I am watching this thread with great interest, hoping to be swayed into something more modern and robust.