It has been a while since I used vanilla Ubuntu, so I apologise if some of my answers are outdated. Last I remember the Grub menu was still there. But yes for point 2 my view on Snaps was largely based on third party comments about the safety/usefulness of them compared to Flatpaks, much of which is may not be accurate any more as I've seen large projects (like Certbot) switch exclusively to Snap.