We've been here before, of course - they pushed their own DE (the original Unity, not the current GNOME theme) for a while as a competitor to GNOME, and they also pushed Upstart over systemd. There are probably other cases I'm missing.
Eventually they gave up on those pet projects for pragmatic reasons, but Snaps seem to be the hill they want to die on (presumably for internal political reasons and/or some weak attempt at lockin).
This is bone-headed NIH move from Canonical, but I don't think either of those are good examples. Both Unity and Upstart were released prior to Gnome 3.0 and Systemd respectively and had a quite a significant investment in development time from developers and Canonical as well as an existing base of regular users and corporate users.
The original Unity DE was released in 2010 prior to the release of Gnome 3.0 in 2011. Upstart was originally included in Ubuntu in 2006 to replace sysvinit, and writing upstart scripts was a huge breath of fresh air. Systemd was released in 2010.
As a developer and user, I hate snaps _and_ flatpak. Both are user-hostile and constant source of problems requiring hours of Googling (especially the Flatpak sandbox!). I ended up purging both from my system a month ago and have been much happier since.
We've been here before, of course - they pushed their own DE (the original Unity, not the current GNOME theme) for a while as a competitor to GNOME, and they also pushed Upstart over systemd. There are probably other cases I'm missing.
Eventually they gave up on those pet projects for pragmatic reasons, but Snaps seem to be the hill they want to die on (presumably for internal political reasons and/or some weak attempt at lockin).