I've updated the Repo Configuration Tool at https://downloads.mariadb.org/mariadb/repositories/ with instructions on how to enable `-dbgsym` packages to show up in APT for bionic, eoan, and focal.
On bionic there's an issue with some warnings that appear when the debug package component is configured and you run an `apt update`. Eoan and Focal don't show those warnings, so it might just be an issue with the version of apt in bionic and not the repository, and the warnings can be safely ignored. My testing hasn't uncovered any other issues, so I think I'm about ready to close this, unless there's something I'm forgetting.
The tool we use for creating our repositories, reprepro, doesn't support .ddeb packages. See: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/reprepro/+bug/799889
It's been a while since I last looked into it (around the time of the 17.10 "artful" release), and the most recent message on the bug report says that there is a patch in the master branch to add support for .ddeb packages. So it's probably time to revist this and manually compile the latest source and try it out.