I still think Ubuntu is the best option (particularly if you want to use the non-LTS releases)
Having said that I do hate snaps and also dislike flatpaks. So what I do is just use the Firefox deb package from the PPA and the chromium package from Linux Mint. Oh, and I have actually replaced ubuntu-advantage-tools with a no-op dummy package.
“they put ads in the terminal” isn’t really accurate.
Their “ubuntu-advantage-tools” adds information to one of their other products to the output of apt. You can easily get rid of that by uninstalling/replacing “ubuntu-advantage-tools”. It’s definitely not like they are selling ad space in your terminal to third parties.