IMHO, that is the correct approach no matter the distro. The OS is a platform, the software included with it should be what works best to support that platform during a given release cycle. Anything beyond that can be addressed by containers, or third-party package repositories (including your own personal repo). It may be a biased perspective from the server side, but give it credit for being based on long, hard experience with frightening permutations (as in ugly, prone to misbehaving, many-headed beasts supporting critical services).
Unless what you're doing is writing an application to be packaged with Debian, the version shouldn't matter to you: /usr/local is there, use it.
(note: none of this is "official" in any way, just what I've learned over 15 years or so of deploying on Debian-derived distros)