You aren't forced, but you are going against the grain of the OS if you start doing things that were not intended by the distribution maintainers. I used Ubuntu for a decade - I'm familiar with it. Every tweak ended up in a more and more unpredictable and unmaintainable system that I had to just dump and reinstall every once in a while.
Correct! Removing Snap Firefox and installing Flatpak Firefox was the first thing I did on my 22.04 install.
Wait.. Why a flatpack? Isn't that just as bad?
No, it really isn't. There are a lot of issues with both snap and flatpak, but the issue at hand is performance, specifically boot times. Snap is far, far behind every other solution out there