I’m using sway for approx. 2 years now and am very happy with it as drop in replacement for i3. What bugs are you referring to?

For bars, there are swaybar and waybar that run very smoothly. It’s not 100 % polybar but with waybar you can get kind of close.

For me, it’s Ubuntu as well. Canonical continuously integrates stuff to make the whole distribution more complex and hard to maintain. Without going into much detail, Ubuntu always tries to do things where there is a good standardized way different. Why the heck do we need yet another containerized GUI application environment (I’m looking at you, Snap!); Why do you develop lxd, when there is systemd-nspawn, docker and podman?!