I think part of this stability stems from the upstream repos being more stable themselves (cheaper and easier than ever to run CI, quality of tools, etc). It's not often that upstream packages break their stable releases, or heck even develop/master.

It also seems like the firehose of upgrades that is Sid/Experimental has slowed down a bit. Even Sid is still on nodejs 18 and not 20 or 21. The same version as both Testing and Stable.

I feel at home at home with Debian Testing, not as bleeding edge as Arch for sure, but I think that is more of a blessing than a curse. The Debian maintainers seem to know what they are doing and the distribution has a sense or maturity that some others lack. I just hope an update won't break GRUB on me :)

Only downsides to running Debian Testing is that it doesn't get security updates with the same speed as Sid or Stable, and third parties don't exactly put together and distribute pre-built packages for Testing specifically. I understand why, but it makes me wonder if things will break due some ABI compatibility issue down the line. Maybe once Debian 13 is released I'll just stick to stable.