It can be done, but it is quite irritating with the way that canonical have made snap a dependency in the minimal meta package. (And minimal on Ubuntu is really really super minimal, doesn't even have ping. Well apart from snap anyway).

They really went out of their way to make it awkward and annoying to take snap out.

use debootstrap to install instead, chroot is your friend. It comes with nothing and I mean that literally while still having the superior ubuntu kernel.