What is cutting edge here?

It depends on how you define cutting edge. Are there more people on stable distros than running release candidates and alpha/beta versions of every software? Probably.

But there are lots of people who choose the features in the latest proper upstream release over "stability" because "stability" gives you very little benefit on an individual system, especially if you eventually have to do the compatibility break anyway.

Where "stable" shines is when you have a large amount of identical systems managed by some kind of central system and you want to keep all of them more or less in sync with updates and control when breakage happens. Here Debian is quite good but "more stable" systems like RHEL and the others with extreme long term support times long past upstream support are again more of a pain and only really used in areas where slow bureaucracies and regulatory environments mandate them because they themselves can't keep up.