I don't do much mountain biking, but I have clipless pedals on my old hardtail, too. When I ride without clipless, I have to constantly remember not to push too hard and be careful, lest my foot slip off. With clipless, I clip in and no longer have to think about it.
I don't really care what other people use. I'll stick with clipless, you can stick with flats or whatever you use, it's fine with me. I use electronic shifting on my road and gravel bikes, and disc brakes on the gravel bike, and I know some people hate both of those things, too. Personally I really like both, but if others still want to use cable shifters and rim brakes, that's fine with me.
Every time this is asked, I post the same comment. I used Kubuntu for years and liked it, but more recently they started doing things that annoyed me. The biggest was related to snaps and Firefox. Now, sandboxing a browser is probably a great idea, but I wanted to use the regular deb install, so I followed the directions to disable the snap install and used the deb. However, Ubuntu overrode that decision several times - I'd start browsing, then realize I was using a snap AGAIN. Happened a few times over a couple years. If it happened once, eh, maybe an error, but it happened 3 or 4 times. I came to the conclusion I wasn't in control of my system, Ubuntu was.
I switched to Debian and am happy with my choice.