Debian: It may not be exciting but its rock stability is what makes it good for the vast majority of people (aka what I would genuenly reccomend to people)
Alpine: Not the easiest or most stable but very lightweight
OpenSuse: Stable yet up to date, very good defaults and themeing is amazing (especially on Sway)
Arch: Ignoring the community or documentation you get a distro with up to date packages and not much else to seperate it
NixOS: Way too advanced for me but I love the way it works, seems amazing for a select type of people
Of course my opinion is objectively correct and if you disagree im going to burn your house down with combustible lemons (made by my team of scientists ofc) /s
Debian: It may not be exciting but its rock stability is what makes it good for the vast majority of people (aka what I would genuenly reccomend to people)
i have historically had more stability issues on windows, than on my bleeding edge archlinux workstation. Sure shit changes, sometimes things break, but i can fix them, or find alternatives/workarounds if i really need to.
Devuan is like Debian but without SystemD and much lighter. Like Debian however you set it up yourself so feel free to use whatever WM you want (I personally like Sway).
antiX doesn't use SystemD, so that works for me. A nice balance between lightweight and being lazy and not having to set it up from scratch, but it doesn't feel quite as janky as Puppy Linux.
Imo when it comes to lightweight distros theres a reason why you set it up manually, when 100mb is the difference between a usable system it makes sense for the user to customize it to their needs.