Snaps have a similar deduplication mechanism, and snaps allows calling apps from their names like you would do with regular packages.
I think the reason for the second one is that while snaps are also meant to be used in servers/cli flatpak is built only with desktop GUI apps in mind.
Nowadays I don't even bother with upgrades anymore. Snaps and Flatpaks auto updates automatically, and for system updates Ubuntu notifies once a week.
For me the experience nowadays is better than before, where app updates are tied to system updates, meaning that older bases (like Ubuntu LTS) got behind on some softwares.