> Is snap actually being forced on users by Ubuntu?

Chromium is a snap in Ubuntu now for a while, even if you install it with apt it just installs the snap.

Canonical wants to deliver the entire OS via snap in the future, and is already partially there on the server with Ubuntu Core and they recently announced an Ubuntu Core Desktop is coming soon.

Yes, it is installed, running a daemon, and spamming mounts and filesystems (~/snap, /snap, etc) at boot up. Well known packages such as chromium convert themselves to snap without warning or permission, then proceed to load a lot slower because they have to be extracted from an image into memory.

Snap is not discrete in any sense of the word.