You should definetely check out Bazzite, it's based on Fedora Atomic and has Steam on the base image. Image and Flatpak updates are applied automatically in the background, no need to wait for the update on next boot. Media codecs and necessary drivers are installed by default.
The Bazzite image also directly consists of the upstream Fedora Atomic image, just with quality of life changes added and optimized for gaming
If that is a good tradeoff for you, old/broken packages but more trusted, then that's okay. Btw, the xz backdoor was found so quickly it didn't even ship to most distros in use, except for Debian Sid and Arch I think
You do seem confused though... Debian is both a distribution and a packaging system...
Yes, Debian is a popular distro depending on Debian packages. My concern is about the update policy of the distro
But the whole reason debian-based distros exist is because some people think they can strike a better balance between newness and stability.
Debian is pure stability, not the balance between stability and newness. If you mean debian-BASED in particular, trying to introduce more newness with custom repos, I don't think that is a good strategy to get balance. The custom additional repos quickly become too outdated as well. Also, the custom repos can't account for the outdatedness of every single Debian package.
you seem to be throwing the baby out with the bathwater... the debian packaging system is very robust and is not intrinsically unlikely to be updated.
Yes, I don't understand/approve the philosophy around the update policy of Debian. It doesn't make sense to me for desktop usage. The technology of the package system however is great and apt is very fast
Okay, I get that it's annoying when updates break custom configs. But I assume most newbs don't want to make custom dotfiles anyways. For those people, having the newest features would be more beneficial, right?
Linux Mint is advertised to people who generally aren't willing to customize their system
Why are debian-based systems still so popular for desktop usage? The lack of package updates creates a lot of unnecessary issues which were already fixed by the devs.
Newer (not bleeding edge) packages have verifiably less issues, e.g. when comparing the packages of a Debian and Fedora distro.