I would have said Ubuntu a year ago, but I've been watching the Desktop Linux space closely for a year now, and it appears Mint is actually more user friendly than Ubuntu, which is quite surprising and nice to know (I'm not a fan of Snap centralisation either). E.g. the GUI app store is superior, it's been demonstrated...along with other things that actually matter under the 'just works' category.
Yep. Mint doesn't have snaps and they've switched their base from Ubuntu to Debian. They haven't caught up to Ubuntu yet but I expect them to eventually. I don't care for Cinnamon myself but they still have an XFCE edition and you can install KDE or another desktop without issues.
Maybe I'm wrong.