While very true for me, the bastards of Xubuntu and Kubuntu got me hooked and over time I learned why what you said is true. The journey is worth enjoying, however one wishes to experience it

I can’t speak for them, but they did start the Linux Mint Debian Edition (LMDE) project as a means to escape total reliance on Ubuntu and their unsavory decisions. It does seem inevitable that every distro will eventually have some amount of AI generated code, if they don’t already.