Yes, I know that the ranking is not a good metric of real world use.
Just posting this because MX Linux has been in the number one spot for a long time (2 years perhaps?) and it's surprising to see some other distro on the top of their site.
I have been using Mint for 3 years straight now. I used MXLinux for a while in the past and to be honest, it felt like a "better Debian" to me. The software from their repo list were usually more up to date and the stuff they did with XFCE really blew my mind.
At one point, I installed Cinnamon over MXLinux as an unholy mix of the two and used that for two years before committing to Mint!
MXLinux gets a lot of things correct about the desktop experience, but it still feels like you need some experience with Linux before using it. For example, one of the quirks in the XFCE desktop was that if the number of files (say 40 filea) in a folder ends up taking the full display page such that there is no , then there was empty space to right-click and get the toggle menu for the folder, then it would always select a file. So if I wanted to open a folder with elevated privileges, I'd have to fire up the terminal and navigate to the folder under root. That problem doesn't exist with Cinnamon as you can toggle the menu by clicking in some obscure corner of the window.
Similarly, some Steam games launch easily with Mint, but you may need to tweak or entirely give up on certain games.
Of course these are trivial stuff, but for a beginner / non-expert, these quality of life feature make all the difference between recommending an OS or wishing to go back to something familiar.