Completely agree on Linux Mint, even though it's still one of my favorite distributions and the one I'm using usually. I'm comfortable with the base Ubuntu system but it comes without all the Canonical garbage (like Snap trying to quietly install itself back when I install an APT package).
Still too much bloatware though, and to my knowledge there is no modern, well documented APT based distro with a community active enough that I can fix my issues reasonnably fast.
I guess I will have to make the jump to Arch. Currently happy with my Regolith install now though, so I'm a bit lazy to explore other options.