Ubuntu has been on a downward spiral for the last decade or more, at this point they have spend more years being bad, than being good. Started when they were trying to push their own Wayland alternative, their own Gnome alternative, and now they try to force their proprietary appstore shop on everybody.
Ubuntu was really good when they were just Debian with some much needed updates and polish, but those days are long gone.
And it's not like I wouldn't love to get rid of .deb, it's a terrible packaging format that had it's best days 25 years ago when it was up against raw tarballs and when packages where shipped on CD-ROM. It's in dire need of a fundamental upgrade, but Snap really is not the way forward and the way they underhandedly force it on users is just disgusting. Either build a packaging format of the future and just use it for everything, or don't.