Both Canonical (Ubuntu) and Red Hat (Fedora/CentOS) have a history of pushing their own stuff on people and locking it in when they have the opportunity to do so. This is no surprise, since both are trying to walk the fine line of being profitable business system/service providers using open-source software. I expect they will do more of this in the future.

They can only do it so much, though, since they don't have unlimited resources and don't want to alienate too many users. Some people find one or both of them tolerable. Some don't even notice the changes, since most of that stuff is just behind-the-scenes plumbing to a typical desktop user.

If you want to reduce the chances of having your setup disrupted by some future obligatory change, I think Linux Mint would put you in a good place. The regular edition is based on Ubuntu, but Mint insulates its users from nonsense like the Firefox Snap (providing a native package instead), and the maintainers have a Debian edition as an exit strategy in case Canonical ever goes off the rails. Ubuntu is based on Debian, so migrating Linux Mint from an Ubuntu base to a Debian base would be fairly painless.

Tip for installation time: Consider putting the /home directory on its own partition. This will allow swapping distros in the future without having to mess with backup/restore cycles to preserve your files and user settings.