My first question was "what's the replacement for aptitude", and people pointed me to "yum shell". It was not as good, but I got used to it, and went with it.
If you run "aptitude" on debian, without any argument, you end up in a TUI, you can use it to install or remove packages from your system, and then see the "preview" of the change, and apply/cancel the change. The same way people use "yum shell".
I'm used to new "dnf shell", so I don't miss aptitude anymore, but I think aptitude is what you're looking for.