I never thought about it before but I use upstream and downstream without much though. For my personal devices and containers I use Fedora but when it comes to servers and VMs I use Debian for its stable nature.
I also run Linux mint in my homelab with pcie pass though so it functions like a normal desktop.
I think it’s pretty normal. For me, I switch back and forth between NixOS and Arch because neither of them provides me with exactly what I’m looking for i.e a distro that has all the packages I use within its repos (I hate compiling) and is static release (I often forget to update), but is not immutable (sometimes I need special programs for university that can only be obtained via compiling from source on a non-immutable distro). Arch and NixOS both have all the packages I need (only ones that do afaik), and one of them pffers static release but is immutable, while the other is rolling release but is not immutable. Currently I’m on Arch, but when (if) it breaks, I’ll just switch to NixOS instead of fixing it, and use distrobox or something similar for any packages that need to be compiled.