Which ROS version makes sense for Universal Robot applications?

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ROS-industrial seems very well developed and maintained but it is based on ROS-Kinetic which was already EOL in April'21. I found out that there's a fork for ROS-noetic: https://github.com/fmauch/universal_r...

There are probably not much relevant changed since Kinetic, so 'kinetic' branch might be active. Furthermore, usually ROS branches are named after the oldest compatible version. This means that the code on Kinetic branch is compatible with Melodic and Noetic. This was very frequently the case in ROS1. Especially, the core messages and libraries didn't change much since Kinetic. Everything became very stable.

However, if I didn't misunderstand, there are some useful features from moveit that are not ported to moveit2 yet, for example moveit setup assistant would be crucial for me since I want to merge urdf models to represent the real environment of the robot.

Actually MoveIt2 is further regarding features then MoveIt. To my knowledge only missing part MoveItSetupAssistant. But, TBH, working without it was also not soooo painful. It depends how complex are your models, but on the end you will have to manually update one or two files.

Also, ros2-galactic EOL is already November'22 and ros1-noetic is still supported until May'25 which I found confusing as well.

Why is this confusing? Galactic is not "Long-Time-Supported" (LTS) version, and Melodic is. Anyway, this year in May ROS2 Humble is coming out and it will be good place to start with ROS2 because some of the core library got much more stable in the last months. Galactic is also very good and stable. I still don't see many missing hot-new features compared to current Rolling release.

I also consider starting from ROS2

To conclude. If you are starting just now, start with ROS2 and save yourself some transition pain in the future. For what I can say, most of the UR-Driver, ros2_control and MoveIt2 developments are happening here and maintainers from those repositories are short on time to give much love to ROS1 version. Therefore, ROS1 versions of libraries will soon (is not already) become obsolete. Depending on what you want to do, some of the more complex scenarios are now much easier to do with ROS2 than it is with ROS1.