People installed Ubuntu ages ago without snap. They were perfectly happy with that decision until Canonical decided to shove snap down their throats leaving them with three choices:

• accept snaps
• remove snaps painstakingly from your system entirely (Windows and Telemetry equivalent)
• switch distro

There is a very clear divide between work needed to achieve these options so saying that snaps are forced on users is fair to say imo. For an example how it should be done: Fedora ships with Flatpak support but I can chose if I want to install Firefox as a Flatpak or a RPM package.