There's an even bigger security hole with Snaps. If a library is compromised on apt, they'll push the update and your applications will be updated. With a Snap, every single snap developer must somehow come across the error (which could be in a sub-dependency), find the fix, then deploy again. Very few (if any) dev teams are that well connected to the development of their dependencies. In contrast, the developers of those dependencies will be very well connected.
> If a library is compromised on apt, they'll push the update and your applications will be updated. With a Snap, every single snap developer must somehow come across the error (which could be in a sub-dependency), find the fix, then deploy again.
Snaps compete with third party apt repositories, not distribution-provided packages (but see below). I've seen a general trend in complex upstreams _bundling_ their dependencies even in builds destined for apt/deb -based distribution via third party apt repositories - because handling differing dependency versions across every distribution release is too complex. In this case, your distinction is moot. In both situations it is up to the upstream developers to update their dependencies. Only that with snaps, their sandboxing security model provides some mitigation.
It is true that some packages traditionally shipped by the distribution are moving to snaps, such as Chromium. This is because these packages are moving to bundling anyway, because updating them during the lifetime of a stable distribution release has become impossible any other way, due to the same dependency pain.
https://forum.snapcraft.io/t/squashfs-is-a-terrible-storage-...
There's an even bigger security hole with Snaps. If a library is compromised on apt, they'll push the update and your applications will be updated. With a Snap, every single snap developer must somehow come across the error (which could be in a sub-dependency), find the fix, then deploy again. Very few (if any) dev teams are that well connected to the development of their dependencies. In contrast, the developers of those dependencies will be very well connected.