Is that the Mac way?
This is how you run a third party Firefox binary package downloaded from Mozilla:
tar xJf firefox-x.tar.bz2 ; cd firefox ; ./firefox
Obviously there is room for improvement here, for some basic sandboxing (chroot, dedicated uid and so on) and desktop integration (give the user an icon to click on, links to other applications).
It's just that Snap (and probably Flatpak too) just isn't it. Much too heavyweight and gave the users other things to worry about (disk space, updates, new types of package repositories). Something more fit for Linux culture would probably be closer to a set of best practices (this is what the executable is called, this is where libraries are put, there should be an icon here in this format), and let a thin wrapper handle it all.