Having worked with the Mint team directly in the past, I can assure you LMDE is last priority for them without as much polish, as it exists as a backup option in case something happens to Ubuntu. This boils down to Ubuntu vs Debian with some mint userland on top.

Everything you described in the second paragraph is exactly why appending site:reddit.com is a thing, it's a source of genuine discussion of products and expertise. That is what gives Reddit its SEO power in search engines and if those communities go, Reddit doesn't have much to fall back on. Meme level fluff can be replicated anywhere.