You having regrets depends on your expectations. If you want a very stable system with little maintenance then you’ll be happy. Packages will be older but that’s what makes it easy to keep stable.
I’m not personally a fan of vanilla Debian because the stable versions are a bit too outdated for the things I like to work with. I do use Debian derivatives though the LTS versions.
If you’re using Debian as a daily driver you can always use a Flatpak if you need a newer version than what’s available in the repos. The foundation is solid, though, and that’s what matters - it’s one of the things that keeps bringing me back to Debian for office workstation use.
You can also use backports for some of the more “system entangled software” that cannot be packaged in a flatpak. Or, you can skip ahead to “Trixie” unstable. It has been great for me for the last several months. It’s arguably more stable than what Ubuntu calls an LTS.