That's problematic unfortunately, because one may need a program that is distributed via snaps.

Interestingly, snap has a service that self-heals, so that if one tried to hack it, it will overwrite the changes. That's... quite malwarish, I'd say, and very unusual in the Unix world.

Regarding hacking it: it's necessary because once snapd is installed, the ubuntu upgrader will sync on every update, so snap is not a service that can be just disabled.

You can just turn off the service and uninstall snapd. It is annoying to have to do it, but it is pretty straightforward. But yes, you will need to then add PPAs for thing that were only in snap, or use appimage or flathub.

My understanding is you can prevent the install using apt preference.

https://linux.die.net/man/5/apt_preferences