> Ubuntu fought a sea of distros and came out as what's very nearly an industry standard, if not an official one.

I think you may be living in a bubble. I've been running devops for various shops for half a decade and I've only once used Ubuntu, because it was already being used by an acquisition.

I won't deny that Ubuntu is popular. It's certainly got the lions share of the desktop market. But there is no such consensus in the server market.