I mean you don't have to use Gnome with debian, iirc they have options for KDE plasma and xfce among others as well.

The freeze-the-world "stable distro" concept is an outdated meme, especially when it comes to desktop usage.

In server usage, at least there is the idea of not breaking things by avoiding major version upgrades of used services/daemons. But even then, freezing the used services alone, while letting other system components have what may amount to thousands of fixes for some of them (and yes, a few bugs), is probably better, at least conceptually. But it's admittedly not a well supported setup, unless you're willing to basically maintain a distro yourself.

And no, the "stable" distro maintainer is not going to magically backport all the "important" changes, unless backport means applying an almost full diff from a later version of the source package.

(I actually mention this because I remember Debian doing this a long time ago with what I think was ffmpeg. lol.)

Many desktop users know this.
Upstream developers definitely know this, and occasionally write about it even.

(I was a Debian user many moons ago. That was before systemd came to existence, or PulseAudio became default in any distro. Went from stable to testing to sid. Testing was the worst, even stability wise. Sid was the best for desktop usage. Then a sid freeze came because a stable release cycle was near. Went to a rolling-release distro and never looked back.)