Appimage for me ticks all the boxes for cross distro package as its very portable, simple to run, what are devs trying to do when creating snaps and flatpack?
Use anything you want, because all of them are safe and speedy.
Flatpaks allow packaging together all dependencies with specific versions with the package. Snaps take it to the next level by allowing to run system integrated sandboxed programs, because Flatpaks cannot have system integration. Appimages are simply the equivalent of portable USB software on Windows.
That is not how it works though, because I have been a part of these religious cults for basically forever. The hobbyist enthusiasm has a threshold, the cultism does not. It is animalistic nature to form and live as tribes. It does not become different just because the congregation tool is virtual instead of real.
Capitalism is not human nature. It is formulated around abuse of human psychology. The documentary Century Of The Self by Adam Curtis will be something you love.
Except Western imperialist countries have exploited hundreds of trillions of dollars from rest of the world, kept them subjugated for centuries, causing these luxurious software development cultures to not formulate in them. You are falsely equating software and politics being affected similarly and to a similar degree.