I'm trying to set up Ubuntu as my daily driver and have been on a spree downloading 3rd party applications to make it usable and noticed that virtually all of them are being distributed as AppImages.

Last time I set up a completely fresh install was pre-COVID and this definitely wasn't the case back then. Usually what I'd do and what I was completely expecting to do this go-around was downloading a .deb and installing it myself OR adding a ppa and using the usual tools (apt) to fetch dependencies, install the pre-compiled binary .. etc. Ubuntu is about as boring as it gets when it comes to Linux distributions so not seeing any kind of .deb in a software release is a bit shocking to say the least.