That’s fair, but that kind of reinforces my point.

If the expected recovery path is “wipe and reinstall,” then it’s clearly not just a thin layer on top of Debian. It’s effectively its own platform with its own assumptions, lifecycle, and upgrade path.

There’s nothing wrong with that, but it’s a very different model from something that can coexist with or cleanly detach from the base system. That distinction matters depending on how people want to use it, especially outside of a dedicated bare-metal server context.

So yeah, Proxmox is built on Debian, but in practice it behaves more like a tightly integrated appliance than a simple UI sitting on top.

Well said, you get what I'm looking for. This might be the reason for me to give freebsd a go. Though my current hardware probably wouldn't play nice with it.