Comment by jeroenhd

You need the .deb files to match your architecture and to have the necessary dependencies available, but for programs like Google Chrome, Discord, and VSCode, those dependencies seem to come down to "any recent version of glibc and openssl" and the .debs themselves are available for multiple architectures.

You're not going to be installing random Debian packages from the Debian FTP server, but for most proprietary software that resorts to "install this .deb", it'll work most of the time, which beats many other distributions.

On the other hand, installing software this way is a great way for upgrades to the next major version to fail spectacularly halfway through, so I'm not so sure if it's a feature or not.