It's annoying fragmentation when even for a stable distributable package there's flatpak as a standard, and I've never seen why Ubuntu needs their own with a proprietary store.
It's the Canonical way, just as with Mir, Upstart, Unity, and a bunch of other NIH Canonical projects.
I miss the old Ubuntu sometimes, the Ubuntu that wanted to be an up to date Debian with sensible defaults, easy installation, and commercial support. It seems that wasn't profitable or visionary enough for somebody though, and we've ended up here instead.