That's kinda Debian's shtick. Its ethos is to be rock-solid stable no matter what. No changes but bug fixes, and it gets those in a very timely manner. It's an amazing distro for what it is, but in a desktop or workstation sometimes you just need up-to-date software and for that, Flatpak makes a whole lotta sense. Stable OS core with the latest applications shipped on top. It may not fit your own use case but it's one of the leading distros that exist, it far exceeds just "decent."

Yep. That "solid, not cutting edge" philosophy is one of the main reasons why Debian is my favorite distro.