I would not claim that Ubuntu is anything but stable. We run a bunch of Ubuntu lts servers at work and there’s hardly any issues. Found a 16.x the other day with over 500 days uptime driving signage. That was desktop version.
I use Debian because of the OSS focus, and stability. And because I know the distro fairly well. They’re conservative in choice of tools and for instance only went full systemd a few years back (5?)
I don’t mind systemd but I don’t mind sysv init either. Even slackwares scripts worked fine. If it’s not broken don’t fix it.