That's not to say that the alternatives have no merit. They do, because they're driven by developers who do have valid differences of opinion from Canonical's approach and want to do things differently. That's always going to be the case because different people are always going weigh things differently and take different directions on things.
But the rhetoric usually becomes louder than the valid discourse.
Take this headline for example. This is entirely about the politics. The technical merit of the Chromium packaging being a snap doesn't apply - because the alternative would be a deb provided and maintained by a distribution, and Mint aren't doing that. Ubuntu switched to a Chromium snap because maintaining the Chromium deb is no longer practical. Many snap critics will tell you that distribution debs are better for curation and trust reasons. That's not an option here, because Mint is not even providing that as an alternative.
> "In the Ubuntu 20.04 package base, the Chromium package is indeed empty and acting, without your consent, as a backdoor by connecting your computer to the Ubuntu Store. Applications in this store cannot be patched, or pinned. You can't audit them, hold them, modify them, or even point snap to a different store. You've as much empowerment with this as if you were using proprietary software, i.e. none. This is in effect similar to a commercial proprietary solution, but with two major differences: It runs as root, and it installs itself without asking you."
The chromium transition was announced in October 2019, https://snapcraft.io/blog/chromium-in-ubuntu-deb-to-snap-tra...
Ubuntu was not able to maintain chromium as a deb package, and chromium is not the default browser in Ubuntu. Therefore, it has been packaged as a snap package. Since there is no longer an apt package, what should happen when you "sudo apt install chromium-browser"? The usable decision was to install the snap package of Chromium instead, https://snapcraft.io/blog/chromium-in-ubuntu-deb-to-snap-tra...
The snap package of Chromium has been in testing for two years already. The snap package page is https://snapcraft.io/chromium You can view the installation log, with the list of operating systems that have installed it.
Those aren't the only two options :) .
Snaps are fully controlled by Ubuntu - for me it's a non-starter.