It’s my choice but Arch and its derivatives look like the trend like CachyOS which is #1 right now on visits on distrowatch. Also I’ve heard Google use Debian as gLinux and I feel many other giants also use it and sponsor it and I’m not comfortable choosing it as my distro. Can the sponsors togethwr with students or any other interested use it for their PCs, either coding or ordinary use? It strictly promotes free but worried about giants and sponsors.
I’m sure Debian would implode if any big corp started to make “hostile” changes to it. It was by some considered controversial to include non free firmware by default - that should tell you a little about how much people care about Debian, as including the non free by default is against the core of opensource.