While I can't quite land on why I didn't use Mint DE, I didn't use Ubuntu because I don't like snap very much. Just about every instance using it has led to either issues clashing with other apps or just complete failure overall. I know you can avoid it and get rid of it but I'm tired of removing things.

I saw MX and was like... "Looks like my desktop as I usually like it." and you can treat MX as if it's just another Debian stable install as far as guides are concerned.