Just curious, why not simply stop using snaps? On my machine, the whole snapd* can be removed, and mozilla offers pretty high-quality ubuntu repo for firefox.
They're doing sly things with snaps, like automatically installing the snap when you try to apt install something. I wouldn't put it past them to try to reinstall snapd without notification. It's easier to just move to a system you can trust.
I don't agree, it's easy to set the mozilla repo as pinned / priority for apt (in fact, mozilla's 2-step instructions help you do that). I'm not sure what the second point means, are you not in charge of the package manager on your system? I can't say I've had apt run without my knowledge :-)
The Ubuntu maintainers have a cohesive vision for their product, and that vision doesn’t align with what I want.
Yes, I absolutely could shoehorn what I want overtop of their vision, but I’d rather just go with something simpler that gets out of the way and lets me do what I want.
If Ubuntu was the only option I’d still use it, but it’s not. Basically any distro can accommodate my needs of providing a base on which to run Flatpaks and docker containers.