Up to date mesa is in regular mint but only sort of. You have to manually go bleeding edge if you want by installing mesa drivers manually.

Yeah, there’s a big difference to a beginner between adding a PPA in Mint (GUI) and all the fuckery of trying to get the latest Mesa in Debian (terminal with risk) even though both could technically be described as “manual”.

Regular Mint is much closer to what the OP is asking for. It removes the crappy Ubuntu stuff but gets to benefit from the good stuff like better hardware support, GUIs for drivers/updates and PPA support which is especially important if you have an AMD GPU as it’s how you’ll get up-to-date Mesa.

Speaking of enshittification… why just post a youtube video with zero explanation of the content?

That’s like them fining me €1.