By design, yes. Debian prioritizes stability over being on the cutting edge. If you always want the latest and greatest, Debian isn't the right distro for you.
Nowadays you can get a full featured, well integrated and properly working user land on Linux with next to zero customisation with systemd and Gnome. I really recommend using a distribution which stays as close to vanilla as possible.
Debian would still patch far too much to my taste without the integration anyway.
They remove/rebrand what they don't find free enough, want to make things "modular", want to split development and base packages, want to support a ton of architectures upstream doesn't care about and want to integrate things in their historic tooling. It has introduced some severe bugs in the past.