The last time I tried it extensively was on Debian Bookwork (12.1 and later; I always wait for the first point release), released July 2023 but freezing sometime around February 2023.

Yes, this was a while ago now. But just as now, people said then "all the bugs are fixed and missing features added"; all that really means is "we're in the long tail". I might've put up with it if not for the fact that there were 2ish major bugs that directly affected my main workflow (e.g. temporarily swapping to non-Latin text input).