It's funny because I found a way to disable auto update for snaps in 2 minutes by Googling and half of the angry voices in gere are because of auto updates. What is going on?
There is this announcement about a new snap release from November 2022 [1] in which they made this possible. So this is a relatively recent addition. Before that, Snap basically did everything in its powers to ensure that all packages were continuously updated.
1. https://snapcraft.io/blog/hold-your-horses-i-mean-snaps-new-...