I used Ubuntu years ago and left after trying 11.04 (has it been that long?) because the new Unity desktop environment was awful and buggy and the release generally didn't work even after I switched desktop environments. Rightly or wrongly, I came to associate Canonical with buggy bloatware.

I like how reliable Debian is for my servers but the package versions are too old for a desktop. Even then, a few days ago, I had to install rust with curl | sh because Debian's package was just too old to build what I needed it to.

I distro-hopped a lot trying to replace what I used to like about Ubuntu on the desktop. Fedora has survived many reinstalls now. Like you say, it's on the cutting-edge but it also doesn't cause major issues most of the time. They're also pretty predictable and don't try anything insane.