I would highly recommend Linux Mint as an alternative. (Cinnamon has my preference)

So far they are still kind of corporate free in the spirit of doing a desktop distribution keeping things as a normal or dev user would expect without pushing stupid changes in order to advance a corporate agenda.

Also, they are currently based on Ubuntu that they debloat but there is a debian based variant (LMDE) that show future perspectives if Ubuntu become not really usable anymore as a base in the future.

Do they take a stance against snap?

They're against it; see for example https://blog.linuxmint.com/?p=3906

tnx, good to know.

then it's just my pref for KDE that holds me back :)

I'm a kde user as well, and since I'm on ubuntu and thinking about switching to something else I did a quick search to see if it was possible to run kde on mint and it appears you can. You have to add the kubuntu backports ppa ("sudo add-apt-repository ppa:kubuntu-ppa/backports") and then you can install kde using apt ("sudo apt install kde-plasma-desktop").

I haven't tried this, so I don't know if it actually works well or not, but it is apparently possible.

Yes

https://blog.linuxmint.com/?p=3906

I would go for Debian or Gentoo.

Or use official PPAs for all the snaps that Canonical is forcing on users.

Not sure official Mozilla PPA is going to ship debs.

Makes it easy then, simply ignore Mozilla. It's not like there are no alternatives.

Pretty much all package managers work the same. Learning dnf when you know apt isn't that big of a deal.

Perhaps, but I use plenty of other Linux distros (at least on servers) for work, so I don't imagine it being a big deal to switch. It's more the inertia stopping me from switching _at all_, rather than any concern about how big the switch would be.