These days Debian Stable is very comparable with Ubuntu LTS. They are aiming for a release at about every 2 years, which is the same cadence as Ubuntu LTS. They do have some different policies, such as using Firefox ESR and other things, but there are also the Backports repository and other niceties. And you don't get Snaps forced down your throat.

> and at that point even "testing" was too old of a kernel to support recent hardware

Today Debian testing has a 5.7 Kernel, which is the most recent one.

Debian is indeed a little "behind" in adopting certain modern technologies compared to other distros like Fedora, but most of the time I see this as a plus, because new tech is often buggy and take a long time to mature. I generally don't like to pay the price of being an early adopter.

> recent hardware

This is indeed an issue. The trick when you get new hardware is that you install Testing but you don't configure your repositories as "testing" you configure them as the name of the current testing distro: "bullseye" today. So if I keep updating my Debian Bullseye, once it gets branched I will be effectively out of testing, then Bulleye will get released and I will be on the stable repository.