The distro family trees are like different pantheons.
Distros are like individual gods. Community developers are priests and end-users are the commoners who pray for blessings, good fortune, and happy lives. Priests direct the prayers of commoners to their respective gods.
There is the Debian pantheon, ancient gods of peace and stillness.
The Arch pantheon, progressive gods that bring revolution along with a bit of chaos.
The Red Hat pantheon, gods tha- wtf am I writing?
No but there is an ideological basis for free software though it is firmly based on practical experiences dealing with the consequences of close source devices.
Red Hat and Ubuntu are business. Debian and Arch are communities. Some of the smaller distros are basically that one guy in Nebraska.
People promote them for various reasons. An IBM employee will have different reasons to the supporter types who latch on to a distro and mascot like it was a football team. Now football, there is a religion. Its all ritual, nothing they do has any practical use, people congregate once a week and in some parts of the world it turns violent.
When the deb users start committing genocide on the rpm users I’ll call it a religion. Until then its just a bunch of anime convention fans arguing about their favourite isekai.