i am genuinely interested why you find it harder to recommend mint. I stopped distro hopping a few years ago, all my boxes are setup with mint and run flawless, so I didn't look elsewhere for a while.
However, I've not had a good time with Ubuntu since I upgraded to 22.04. I normally stick to LTS releases, but I upgraded to 22.10 in the hope it would fix some of my issues. I've switched one of my machines to Mint and it's been pretty good, so I'm thinking about ditching Ubuntu entirely. I haven't really evaluated a the distro space, so I just picked Mint because I used it before and it seems okay.