These days all of my “Debian” bare metal systems are technically running Proxmox, which I think is a relatively happy medium as far as the base Debian system goes — the Proxmox kernel is basically the Ubuntu kernel, but otherwise it’s a pretty standard Debian system.
I’ve thought about (ab)using a Proxmox repository on an otherwise stock Debian system before just for the kernel…
Same at $work all physical servers run proxmox VE (by policy), 90% of VMs are debian (cloudinit genericcloud), the rest misc linux and various windows.