Canonical’s announced a major shift in its kernel selection process for future Ubuntu releases. An “aggressive kernel version commitment policy” pivot will see it ship the latest upstream kernel code in development at the time of a new Ubuntu release.
Original announcement: Kernel Version Selection for Ubuntu Releases
It is actually easier and more friendly for more advanced and technical users. I switched to Arch from Ubuntu 12 years ago after dealing with yet another dependency hell and 3rd party repo breakage. I gave it a shot (which was easy as Arch had a tui installer back then) and was shocked how easy it is to get everything running the way I wanted it comparing to anything Debian-based.
Had the same journey. Thats the thing though, once you start with custom ppas and packages arch becomes much better. Today, users should largely pull in newer programs through snaps/appimage/flatpak, so I think it’s gotten better than it used to be.