Canonical’s announced a major shift in its kernel selection process for future Ubuntu releases. An “aggressive kernel version commitment policy” pivot will see it ship the latest upstream kernel code in development at the time of a new Ubuntu release.
Original announcement: Kernel Version Selection for Ubuntu Releases
Had the same journey. Thats the thing though, once you start with custom ppas and packages arch becomes much better. Today, users should largely pull in newer programs through snaps/appimage/flatpak, so I think it’s gotten better than it used to be.