It was already time for a new staple distro of Linux, as Debian had long chosen the standard path of bloat, privacy leaking, and insecurity by default. The excuse is usually because they want everything possible to work out of the box, automatically, including security.

It's already become super hard to tell what your Debian install is doing behind the scenes, why not include something as critical as secret code that is firmware automatically flashed to your hardware and it's lowest communication layers.