I personally use any distro based on the situation.

As others have pointed out, common reasoning behind picking a distro include: hardware requirements, existing ecosystems, end user, package management, configurableness, security, long-term support, ease of learning, driver support, core dev team’s opinions, funding, etc.

I don't remember exactly, it was 6 years ago. I remember the general feeling of having to do too much work to get a usable desktop. Maybe the settings? Keep in mind that I don't need anything fancy. I liked Gnome 2 and I stayed with Gnome Fallback until last year when there were enough Gnome Shell extensions to bend it to what I like a desktop to be.

Maybe Debian is on par now. Old software can be worked around with containers and third party apt repositories. I often do that on Ubuntu too.

Debian has improved greatly in the last six years.

Try it with the xfce or mate flavours.