Yeah, I get your reasoning – but there are other distros that match all of that as well. PopOS and ElementaryOS are two that I have personal experience with. Elementary had a rocky upgrade once so I tried PopOS and haven’t looked back. It’s great. Ubuntu minus the crap. The average user (getting recommended mint) probably wouldn’t care about being on the latest release and would likely not even run updates all that often, so even Elementary would’ve been a good choice for them. I have since installed it on my girlfriend’s slow/old laptop and it works very smoothly there compared with windows.