Earlier quoted context omitted.
The thought of people going to Pop to escape snap has me crackling.
Tbf it doesn't default to the really slow snaps. Instead it defaults to the dreadfully slow flatpaks.
That is, IIRC, you get (say) Firefox via Debs in Pop. Canonical wants to install it via Snap.
IMO Flatpak is a great option for a set of desktop software where packaging across distros may be problematic for some reason. I use the Firefox Flatpak on Fedora / RHEL because it doesn't disable the video codecs, for instance. The native package doesn't have some codecs enabled.
Canonical is (AIUI) pushing Snap for desktop and server software. And Canonical is the only source of Snaps, I believe? With Flatpak you get Flathub but AFAIK anybody could set up a repo of Flatpaks.