For me the footguns in debian have been an unintuitive upgrade process that lets you break things, and configurations/software that don’t work well out of the box without user knowledge and intervention. But for my server, Debian has been very nice and lightweight.

Even though Ubuntu is not always pure good the way that Debian is (remember when they had Amazon advertisements and search integrated into the desktop), and minor annoyances like the apt advert are annoying, but they offer an amount of stability and ease of use that I think earns the nickname “preconfigured Debian”