>Uh, it should be? The ability to confidently stop is far more important than to go

First off, this is the principal skinner "everyone else is wrong" take.

Second, it's just not how things work in practice. In practice what happens if you have a FWD car that can't "just go" you wind up driving way harder to make up for it. Stuff like hitting hills at speed and trying to take on-ramps at the limit of traction because you are having to work around the limitation of being unable to actually put power to the ground when you need to. Say nothing of all the sketchy situations that happen at the margin of that (backing down a hill you couldn't go up, getting stuck less than graceful merges, etc).

>You also missed another key reason to get snow tires: many (most?) vehicles do not come with AWD even as an option

I don't think that's anywhere near true for the US market.