You can always reduce anything to "its just linux". But the glue around, the good updates, the stability, the great integration with ceph, make the whole difference..
It's part of the appeal that it is mostly just Debian under the hood. If I want to run containers I would also not see it as the best choice but it really shines in managing qemu VMs.
I've been on Incus with my homelab for a few months now, and couldn't be happier. Maybe I should make a post about it, but I don't have much to report. My biggest maintenance outage was forgetting to set WakeOnPower in the BIOS.
Edit: And yes, all I want to do is run containers. Nothing fancy, Nginx Proxy Manager suffices for networking, and Linstor/DRBD handles disk. I wanted to remove hyperscaling complexity, but keep immutability, and so far, life is good.