If DBZ stopped at Freeza saga, how would debates change?

I believe there would be massively less lowballing of DB characters and such.

That's an interesting point. Goku could have destroyed Earth in the Saiyan arc and Freeza could casually blow up planets with the tip of fingers in his first form. By the end of the Freeza arc, Goku would have been called one of the most powerful fictional characters without all the other forms. It was building up for Goku to be the strongest character in the universe, so fans would probably say only someone like Dr. Manhattan could beat him.

Are you asking because of all these comicvine battles? They're just silly anyways. Superman can be beaten by a little green rock, Tony Stark can be crippled from a glass of alcohol, and Batman can get knocked out by some random thug with a vase. Heck, Toriyama made up power levels just to make fun of how meaningless they are.

There wouldn't be stupid fan calculations of PLs which made zero sense and feats would be more looked at which there are plenty of. Even still as noted, PLs became pointless after Frieza, so why can't people just go off of feats? There's plenty there to gauge off how powerful someone is, you don't need the PLs.

It would also make the humans less useless I feel, because SSJ being the only transformation which it should have. I mean yeah after SSJ, the humans were useless, but it's not like they couldn't learn Kaio-Ken and continued to train and thus possibly reaching near SSJ or being able to contend if they utilize their powerset right.

I dont think they'd change that much. You'd still have the DBZ fanboys claiming Goku could destroy stars and move faster than the speed of light and blow up planets with a punch. There's no evidence of any substantial increase in power in canon post Freeza saga, outside of Beerus and Whis specifically, but that doesn't stop the ridiculous claims. We'd still have people using their calculations to contradict Toriyama: "Actually, since Vegeta at a pl of 18,000 could destroy a planet, then by my calculation SSJ Goku, with his pl of 150 Mil, could destroy 8300 planets! Toriyama just got it wrong!" Nothing would change.