As a mostly volunteer based distro, Debian definitely can't keep up with everything, but Ubuntu inherits the majority of their package versions directly from De

As a mostly volunteer based distro, Debian definitely can't keep up with everything, but Ubuntu inherits the majority of their package versions directly from Debian unstable. For more core things like GNOME they can be more up to date, but they also employ people to do that work directly in Debian instead of in Ubuntu. They are also heavily moving towards dropping apt and adopting snap packages, which means faster updates because each snap package is a self-contained filesystem unconnected to the rest of the distro.