Thank you for those links, since tomorrow I expect most of Reddit to go dark I took the liberty of archiving them so I can be sure I can go into more depth then.
I'm on testing, which just released as Debian 12. mate-desktop is 1.26.0, but a few things (like mate-applets) are 1.26.1 and a few (like mate-panel) show up as 1.27.0. I don't use Ubuntu, so I don't know how these compare to whatever Ubuntu uses.
https://www.reddit.com/r/debian/comments/12gyjpg/debian_mate...
https://www.reddit.com/r/debian/comments/13ueaub/debian_12_m...