My experience is that the only concrete "benefit of Ubuntu" is that ZFS ships pre-compiled as a kernel module instead of having to be compiled on upgrade, other

My experience is that the only concrete "benefit of Ubuntu" is that ZFS ships pre-compiled as a kernel module instead of having to be compiled on upgrade, other than that I am not sure what benefits Ubuntu provide on desktop over Debian. Saying that Debian is "not Ubuntu to begin with" is of course technically true, but the similarities are so large that I have a hard time seeing anyone would have much of an issue switching, Ubuntu is and always has been based on Debian. On servers, my experience is that Ubuntu is, while not "better", far more common, simply because of the fact that they have a more clear and understandable paid support plan, which I guess makes sense. Not that most users bother to pay for it anyway, but at least it's there if you end up with an EOL system you can't decom.