Are you sure about that? AFAIK both mint and pop completely purge the base distro of snaps

Unless I purposely removed it and blanked the memory of it, Pop just deals in deb's and flatpak.

Not that I'm entirely jazzed with flatpak.. Poor construction of the permissions can lead to shitty experience that doesn't happen with a deb.

Does it not? Pop!_OS uses Flatpak, I believe.