I looked into it. You’re right.
They implemented the ability to permanently hold all automatic updates.
After five years of debate during which they consistently claimed that the whole point of Snaps is that developers can push whatever, whenever.
Linus swore that Bitkeeper wouldn’t alter the agreement further, like a mad egotistical movie villain.
Canonical is very clearly funneling their userbase towards a Snap-only environment (something that already exists as an option).
As the sole keyholders, and as a for-profit business, what is the next step?
Is it to maintain a wealth of options, even when that cuts into profit margins? What about when those options are competing products (think Gnome and KDE back in the Unity days)?
These things just do not make sense from a business perspective, and they will not be necessary once their userbase is locked into the Snap walled garden.
As to your point about licenses and market share, default non-options and limited choices aren’t compatible with conversations about choice.
“Use Snaps”
“No” (installs .deb)
“Fuck you, use Snaps”
(The Snap Store is a proprietary closed-source black-box that updates your snaps without asking and every part of this statement was a deliberate planned feature by Canonical)