I personally wouldn’t stay away from Ubuntu just because of petty nerd shenanigans like this one. At the end of the day it’s still a very mature and beginner friendly distro.
I used to use it back in the day, I even kinda liked that Unity thing they were doing for a minute. Whenever I end up back there (technically I'm already on Linux because I have a Steam Deck) I'm more likely to look for something lightweight
It's centralized and controlled by Canonical, it enforces updates and you can't disable it, sometimes when you uninstall snapd it cames back when you apt update and most importantly, it is painfully slow.