“Canonical only having snap releases was harmful to adoption. I liked using lxd, but uninstalled snapd (forgetting lxd used it), and my vms obviously stopped. Snap wouldn’t reinstall properly (various inscrutable errors), so I moved it all over to libvirt. I’d still be happily using lxd if it weren’t for Canonical’s snap-pushing. That’s my anecdote of one.”
-mkj
(I’m not mkj so…, but I think most users are quite against enforcement of snapd)
This is new, debian used to be either way behind or broken for less popular packages, but that has completely reversed over the past decade, people just haven’t gotten over the perception yet.