Long time gentoo advocate(/fanboy) here, and so, it stings a little to say this, but, there are ways to use gentoo that do not have you learn as much about your system as, say, e.g. CRUX, KISS/Carbs, LFS(?), starting with just a busybox and kernel, Exherbo, or even many ways of using slackware [and several other suggestions yet, but gotta cut the list short somewhere].

Gentoo's very conveniently wrapped up with portage. So conveniently, you can be forgiven for lingering in the convenience and not venturing deeper into what the convenience wraps around. It's not a thick opaque plastic wrap like some distros that try hard to lower the entry bar, but it is still convenient. ... Conveniently availing advanced fidelity of choice over what you're installing, conveniently managing complexity in simplicity, but ultimately a convenience trap still none the less. ... Many Gentoo users look like uneducated yokels in flying saucers, compared to those who actually do compile their software themselves (they run make), rather than those who have emerge do it for them. [Or an even more extreme example, we're like anyone using an LLM voice assistant.] As in: We're not superior skilled savvy sysadmin, we just have better tools.

And why do the effort of learning to become better, when the machine does it for you.

But then, with gentoo, you do still have the choice. Gentoo is all about choice.

One can try say same for any distro, and that's true, for all being (mostly) Free Software ("Opensource") and so can study (freedom1) it to whatever depth your curiosity takes you, but, Arch does try take some of your choice away from you, not the freedom to study it, but in that it insists it have the freedom to bite you. [ Though, there be ways to mitigate that ]. Debian (or Devuan), Gentoo, Suse, and others, let you opt-in to the fast lane. Arch seem to be screaming "COME WITH US, FAST AS WE CAN!!!" and leaving little room to hear anything about taking arch to a slow lane.

No, Debian is typically quite a bit older than even the Ubuntu LTS. E.g. they currently still don't ship a Nvidia driver that supports the 50 series GPUs.

Slower on updates, not slow to run. Slower on updates is referring to how it takes longer for new features / software to be shipped out for you to download. Debian usually prioritizes machines that chug along for a long time without anything breaking, rather than adding new stuff

You're right that it's not slow to run. It is small and fast

Performance differences between distros tend to be negligible. Unless you have a specific use case and a distro specifically tuned for that, you will hardly notice any difference.

Ubuntu is based off the testing version of Debian, so they have newer software versions

Your logic seems sound, yup.

Though broader than the issue you're responding to, the bigger quality of note in Ubuntu, is not that it's slow (nor larger), but instead, the most issue of ubuntu, is that they're very very silly. More marketing silly than sensible development.

Better Ubuntu be slow than fast anyway. See what they do when they try go fast? Like replacing the userland with rust...

That's beyond just "ready or not, here it comes" release model madness.

It's silly.