It's becoming more and more common in my experience, hence the long post. Ubuntu's notorious hiding snaps in apt by writing wrappers and making it hard to work around it is the next level of this trend - and it is deplorable. That type of obfuscation and attempted deception is not the spirit of open source.

That's a good point. I've stayed completely away from Ubuntu since they started down that path, which has made me out of touch with the day to day experience of its users. Deplorable is the right word.