I am not sure what are you trying to argue here. The topic was upgrade process. Even Windows 11 hardware requirement, which is sad but too recent to be relevant, does not stop it from upgrading from Windows 10 on unsupported machines.
And even if Debian runs on more machines than Windows (which I doubt), most of them are probably VMs, that have only a few apps installed, and just get rebuilt instead of being upgraded. Which means that fact is also irrelevant for dist upgrades.
it's not a like for like comparison, Debian runs on many more platforms and supports far more exotic hardware configurations that Windows
I've also never had a Debian upgrade trash a filesystem entirely either, but have had that happen on a Windows 10 "upgrade", when it decided to overwrite the MS dynamic disk software RAID superblock with garbage
(not to mention the random registry corruptions that seemed to plague Windows installations in the not-too-distant
past without even needing to do an upgradep)
And even if Debian runs on more machines than Windows (which I doubt), most of them are probably VMs, that have only a few apps installed, and just get rebuilt instead of being upgraded. Which means that fact is also irrelevant for dist upgrades.