I'm okay with claims that snapshots are much better than backups for many uses. But in this case the GP was explaining that they only used their backups once in several years, so they did not need to change their backup system.

I'm in the same boat. I configured remote backup systems on a handful of computers. I think I reached for backups only twice over the last ten years. Of course I need something, backups or snapshots, but for my use case snapshots (with a network copy) would need work to set up. And if the remote storage is worse, that would be more of a problem than the changes in the restore process.