Ubuntu did what Debian failed at. Better LTS, More features including drivers, available by default by most providers, lot more branding/documentation and in the early days, easier distribution. I am old enough to remember distro like SuSe Linux etc and when Ubuntu came on scene, it became the de facto.

Debian's modern release cadence and optional backports seems to have turned this around, to a degree.

I moved all my new server/service deployments back to Debian around 2021/2022 (bullseye era).