Commenting on this based on a recent discussion with the snapd team.
A recent regression occurred with the Xenial netplan Debian package, where a patch got dropped which made netplan try both the snap service and standard upstream service names for NetworkManager when applying a new configuration. The original patch also stated that the patch should get dropped if/when snapd was fixed:
The ability to declare a daemon alias would allow us to finally drop the patch for good.
The bug is currently being worked on, but it’s unclear to me whether we really want to enable this behavior (i.e. make netplan try both names) for Bionic or not (the Bionic bug task is currently FixCommitted)?
Here’s a link to the forum post where the regression was first discovered: