@civodul The non-snap option was removed in Ubuntu 22.04, at which point flavors like Kubuntu that hadn’t made the snap their default in 21.10 also had to switch. (This was one of the last straws inducing me to just switch back to Debian and stop trying to make my Ubuntu more Debian-like.) There was a fair amount of public scrutiny at the time, but I guess most anti-snap folks have found their workarounds by now: I don’t really see much ongoing discussion.
@civodul I suspect the reason for the wrapper deb package is to make the presence of some web browser visible to fill other deb packages’ dependencies.