Debian stable (buster currently) is my daily driver. I'm quite happy that I have stable targets of packages to develop against. I'm curious about the type of work you do that Debian packages are "outdated" and do not enable you to continue your work.
I've used many different distros but I keep coming back to rock-solid Debian.
I guess front-end development is the obvious one. The Node.js version on Debian Buster is 10.15.2~dfsg-2, while you have 12.16.2 on the official NodeJS website.
To be fair, OP mentioned that the official packages were often useless, not the distribution as a whole (you can often install custom packages / binaries, although it's not nice).
I've faced many issues with Debian a few years ago regarding the old packages, one of them was building stubby from source which required getdns 1.1.2 at least, no luck the one in the repository didn't satisfy the version requirement, I tried to build getdns from source but faced an issue with the too old GCC version, I had to "frankeindebian" with gcc and g++ from debian unstable repository. I then decided to switch to Fedora. Don't get me wrong, stability is good, especially when you have to deal with Nvidia. Fun fact: I tried to install CUDA on Fedora 31 Workstation but faced an issue with a too recent version of GCC, it really depends on the use cases.
I've felt like the gap became smaller, either stuff isn't changing so fast anymore, or I just got lucky and only dealt with things that had good backwards compatibility.
Either way I'm usually always switching to testing about half a year before it becomes stable. It usually already is pretty stable at that point, and if I do encounter an issue I like to report it to give a little bit back, to help make the next stable release a little more stable from the start. :-)
I've used many different distros but I keep coming back to rock-solid Debian.