It's nice mint developers have an insurance policy against upstream woes. Makes me sleep better at night, even if I didn't switch for the Debian based version yet, knowing it's harder for the project to suffer some rug pull similar to what happened to CentOS.
I also wonder if there's a good way to monitor the "social health" of a lot of these projects. Debian seems to be relatively stable, at least from the outside, but how to tell if something is relatively healthy, i.e. say the Linux kernal, Debian or python vs if its fate is headed to something like the old OpenSSL where it was one guy plugging holes by himself like the Dharma Initiative guy on Lost...
Lots of Linux is Debian with patches. By install count or user count I suspect Debian and derivatives are ahead of all the others. Wouldn't be surprised if they're ahead of all the others combined.