If that’s the case, I’d better instead make the claim that Toyota used to be the Debian of cars.

You don’t really give any information that could be used to personalize this recommendation, but I can tell you that the classics have become classics for a reason. You might not personally like them all, but no book remains being read over centuries if it sucks.

Toyota Corolla is not “fine”, it’s a marvel of engineering, reaching levels of reliability and quality control previously unfathomable, the world’s best-selling car of all time, still going strong and still constantly improving after six decades.

But yes, Debian is the Toyota Corolla of Linux.

“Lisp is worth learning for the profound enlightenment experience you will have when you finally get it; that experience will make you a better programmer for the rest of your days, even if you never actually use Lisp itself a lot.” — Eric S. Raymond, How to Become a Hacker

There’s definitely some truth behind the hyperbole in that quote and there are quite a lot of techniques from functional programming that can be used also in a language like Python with good results, when used judiciously.