Now of course this is just a hypothesis, but I'm starting to consider evaluating other distros as well, just in case I'm missing something.
I'm a backend developer doing some system development as well.
My question: how would you go about evaluating alternative distros? Where would you look at first?
You said you wanted more up-to-date software. If you want to be on the bleeding edge, you might want to consider a rolling release distro, such as Arch or its derivatives. Arch is great if you want to hand-craft your installation starting from a bare-bones tty. If that's too much trouble, something like Manjaro or EndeavorOS will give you up-to-date packages but with an easier installer and more preinstalled packages.
If you don't want a rolling release, there are other distros which release more frequently than Debian stable. Ubuntu releases every six months (although anecdotally most users seem to stick with the LTS releases). Fedora releases every six months or so. openSUSE Leap releases every twelve months or so.
The main difference in the families is the package manager. So, long story short, pick a distro with a package manager you like (or want to try), and forget about most of the rest. The only other detail worth paying attention to is the type of release a distro follows (rolling or not), pick whatever release method suits you best.
For cutting edge development use a rolling distro with an LTS kernel.
Further there isn't that much difference between distro families, devil is in the details and most modern distros let you choose them, do you want Pulseaudio and/or ALSA, systemd or rc or other alternatives, and so on.
I personally use Manjaro on most of my computers and raw Arch on specialist ones (mainly because there is a lot of Arch related knowledge and info online).
In fact this is why I use Ubuntu through WSL2 on Windows rather than a bare metal Linux install, the Windows side makes sure all device drivers are functional with no effort, plus I can play games when I want to without Proton.