Only if you do something like this... export HISTCONTROL=ignorespace

Personally I like this which reduces noise in history from duplicate lines too. export HISTCONTROL=ignoreboth:erasedups

While you aren’t wrong, I haven’t seen a distro that defaults to bash not have this enabled by default for a long while.

I remember reading a very similar chain last year, trying it on my Proxmox host, and then being surprised it didn't work. I'm sure it's not the only modern distro this way, but I can't claimed to have tried very many after that.

I don't have debian handy to check at this moment, but the devuan machine (and devuan is typically debian config for the 99% of things that are not systemd) I have installed using mostly defaults, does not have it enabled by default.