Snippets are won by format as much as by ranking. Google lifts passages that answer the question in forty to sixty words, appear under a heading that matches the query, and stand alone without the surrounding context. Lists and tables win their own snippet formats. The page usually needs to be in the top ten already, but not at position one.
The trade-off is genuine: a snippet increases visibility and brand recall while reducing clicks on queries whose answer is complete in the box. It is worth winning on queries that lead somewhere — where the answer creates a follow-up question — and worth less on definitional queries where the searcher is done. The same passage structure is what gets quoted in AI answers.