Not surprising as the LXD team was the only part of Linux containers community that actually achieved something. Stéphane Graber presented a exciting new functionality every month or so on his YT channel.

With that said, LXD currently builds from source and can install on Debian without needing snap. Canonical's VM counterpart "multipass" while on github cannot (easily) be built from source code and requires snap to install.

I very much hope LXD does not go that route.