The SOC also isn't fully open, so you won't get top tier performance with a purely FOSS stack. I push the limits on mine (Retropie mostly), so using their OS is the better bet (I use the one shipped by Retropie, which is super old).

I actually kinda hate the Raspberry Pi because of how closed it is. It's gotten a bit better over the years, but the Pi 5 took a big step back. But unfortunately, its competitors aren't much better, so I still use my RPis, but I probably won't buy more.

I'm also not a fan of Debian in general, so if I switched, I would probably use openSUSE or Arch instead (I tried Arch, but it had issues syncing to disk after updates; they fixed that, but it shows that other distros will be a bit wonky). Raspbian works, so I stick with it.