I deployed Ubuntu on a LOT of servers 10 years ago because at the time, they had a track record of doing good things in, with, and for, the Linux and open source community. I had already been using it on the desktop for a long time by that point and knew it well. Ubuntu was far and away the most popular; it was a very safe and sane choice.

That changed when they started heavily promoting Snaps as the next big thing and started putting features and updates behind their enterprise offerings. Basically, they stopped being "Debian, but better." And Debian also made lots of incremental improvements in user-friendliness in that time. Basically, Debian is now pretty much what Ubuntu always promised to be.