i am also in favor of choice and understand wanting a system to do what i believe is most comfortable to me and in my best interest.
i just started using rednotebook from the ppa (on an ubuntu 18.04-based distro) and really like it.
the blog post that i saw contains a link to these instructions which offer a way to avoid using timeshift:
If for some reason you do not want to use timeshift, you can force the upgrader to not require it by typing the following command: "
sudo touch /etc/timeshift.json".
but that skips the point made by:
The upgrade overwrites files in /etc/ with default configuration files. You can restore files indivually by the Timeshift snapshot you made prior to upgrading.
which was that they are trying to give users a method to restore their configuration files.
for that reason alone (overwriting config files) i would probably skip the upgrade, but i just wanted to point out that there appears to be a way to bypass timeshift if you want to give it a try.