not so much as Mint being the “best way”, but Mint being a safe, friendly starting point – once you get your feet wet, you can start looking around at the other options (which can be pretty overwhelming initially) – and just as a lot of people use Mint as a jumping off point, a lot of people also stay with Mint

and yes, despite distro-hopping being a running joke, it exists because Linux distros make it relatively easy to do

the biggest change to keep an eye on is the development of atomic (“immutable”) distros – anything that makes it harder to bork your system and easier to recover afterwards (including recovering all of your configurations and customizations) is getting a lot of attention