To avoid them for your personal needs, no they’re not hard to avoid. Just don’t install anything yourself via Snap. Use apt, Flatpak instead. Or any other means.
Not entirely accurate. Some apt packages like firefox and chromium just install the corresponding snap.
Snap has it’s use cases, but it should not be a silent substitute for .debs
I can see using snaps when the alternative is to break things. But mozilla team is already packaging as .deb for ubuntu available through the mozillateam ppa.
This seems to be canonical arbitrarily injecting the snap store as a dependency for firefox with no clear benefit and noticeable performance issues