It's much better these days.

The old installer (boot-floppies) was legendarily prickly at the time Ubuntu was introduced, but it's long since been replaced by the much friendlier debian-installer. And the default install images now include non-free firmware by default, so modern wifi, bluetooth, and graphics hardware are fully supported.

To be honest, Debian now tends to be fairly vanilla and boring and it's actually Ubuntu that often ends up being a bit weirder. For example, consider how they treat the Snap packaging system for consumer software, or the rust rewrite of coreutils. Debian provides both as supported options (of course it does, Debian supports pretty much everything!), but Ubuntu pushes them to all users by default.