I find Debian very user-friendly, there shouldn't be much config file tinkering, especially if the machine is well supported by Linux. The situation is probably better than a few years ago, but overall I think that's been the case for some time now.
I'm primarily interested in 1. having all hardware work out of the box, 2. working suspend to disk/RAM, 3. not having to edit `Xorg.conf`, 4. relatively painless upgrades.
Ubuntu gives me all of that and has served me well for 15 years. But their transition to snap forces me to look for something else.
3 hasn't been a thing for a few years now. `Xorg.conf` technically still exists, but the normal display configuration flow doesn't touch it.
4 is better in Debian than it is in Ubuntu, in my opinion. Updates are really painless and well done. But notice that the cycle is different: Ubuntu gives you 6 months release cycles and an LTS every 2 years. Debian gives you a "when it's ready" release cycle with a expected time of 3-4 years, and two rolling releases. That is, "stable" is like a LTS release. If you're running a desktop system, you should probably use "testing", despite the name.
I'm not sure I agree, maybe a better compromise is:
* run stable by default
* if at one point there are too many packages that you find outdated and which have a suitable version in testing, upgrade to testing, pinning the distribution name, so that you're back to (the new) stable once it's promoted
Testing changes a lot right after a release, so I find it better to avoid it during that phase if I don't strictly need it. There are also more upgrades in testing and unstable than in stable, and the less upgrades, the less I need to reboot (or at least close my user session) which is a plus.
You're right. But, to be honest: my solution to that is to run unstable.