Totally understandable. For whatever it's worth, you can permanently disable and remove snap and snapd from an Ubuntu system (I had to do this recently with a raspberry pi 5). The amount of work to do this, however, may be practically equivalent to installing plasma on mint / lmde, but the guides on this are thankfully straightforward in case you're ever interested.
https://www.baeldung.com/linux/snap-remove-disable
This works well in practice, and upgrades still work as intended. I may need to follow this guide again very soon, as nextcloud pi unexpectedly died on me. I'm thinking of flashing either Ubuntu or trying their Debian fork out again.