I personally use OpenSUSE and Manjaro as my daily drivers after switching from Ubuntu 3 years ago, and have yet to encounter any package problems that directly stemmed from not using Ubuntu. For everything else, there's always Flatpak.
Regular Mint and POP are Ubuntu based so if Canonical goes away tomorrow or more realistically bought by some big hostile company, what could you use? From the big distros run by foundations only Debian is truly community driven and OpenSUSE is independent but backed by a company. Fedora is owned by RH and can start doing the same bullshit as Ubuntu any day if they wish so. Arch and NixOS are community distros but both are kinda niche.
>so if Canonical goes away tomorrow or more realistically bought by some big hostile company, what could you use?
These are hypothetical scenarios and irrelevant to the context of this thread, which is about asking for Ubuntu alternatives now. The alternative doesn't have to be 100% community driven or completely detached from Ubuntu. It just needs to be usable without the nonsense of Ubuntu Pro or Snap.
I personally use OpenSUSE and Manjaro as my daily drivers after switching from Ubuntu 3 years ago, and have yet to encounter any package problems that directly stemmed from not using Ubuntu. For everything else, there's always Flatpak.