On desktop, Fedora has been by far the most reliable. Ubuntu LTS, as far as I can tell from using it for work, just means that annoying bugs that have been fixed in the upstream never get backported.
Case in point: Bluetooth on Ubuntu LTS has always been much less reliable for me than on Fedora.
Disclaimer: This is only my anecdotal experience, use whatever works best for you.
> you can't get only the bug fixes without the new bugs
> if you know how experiment with getting a new kernel or video driver
I would agree with you if I was on my old machine with an nVidia graphics card which for what it is worth my new machine is a much better experience with AMD processor and integrated graphics but still how do you explain audio in failing to work as soon as I upgraded to Fedora 33 / kernel 5.8 and it (mostly) resolving itself when upgrading to 5.9 kernel? Is this a kernel bug or not? What caused it? What can we do to prevent it from happening in the future?
Then when I want to try the next LTS years later I install it on a different partition and check if it works or not for my use case.
For my work I use Intellij , when there is a big update I get the .tag.gz and try it. If something goes wrong I still have the working version and I can go back.
Updating to latest and greatest was fun when I had the time and when I knew how to format the disk using "fdisk" and it was pleasurable to read and tweak stuff, this days I don't care about shiny stuff and my work does not require latest libraries and I am not using any first gen of hardware.
So IMO if you want stability and no surprises and the ability to maybe upgrade the kernel and a driver Ubuntu is a good solution(not sure about Debian or SUSE) and also I don't have experience with Wayland so maybe that invalidates things and is impossible to get a stable working Wayland setup.