The standards for what constitutes adware are a bit higher than on other OSes, however I also see this as a warning sign and I despise snap. As someone who also vets Linux installs for some relatives I used Ubuntu on these and I regret it a bit. It's nothing you can't fix yet, but it becomes an annoyance.

This and the silent introduction of phased updates and some broken updates makes me avoid Ubuntu in the future for sure. My go-to would probably be Debian which I personally use, however something like Silverblue or microOS might also be attractive in the future ... but not yet for casual users.

edit: Or maybe vanillaOS, if I ever get over the waste that is a/b partitioning.