I’ve had such bad experiences with snaps, I think I would have to hear that things have changed dramatically before I would even try a distro that relies on them. Flatpak seems to be fine. But apt / debs are very comfortable and familiar and I know multiple ways of working with them.

Good for Mint. Someone has to keep app and lib developers honest, not hiding behind packaging every app with its special-snowflake version of every dependency. (And I’m a developer, so I know it isn’t always easy to make an app robust against upstream version changes, but ignoring the reasons something might break can cause one to overlook possible errors or invalid assumptions in one’s own code.)

Tools to aid in mass-deployment are nice, but they shouldn’t be a crutch to hide overly-sensitive apps from their host OS’s valid version changes and updates. IMHO.