Snapshots are official builds, they just aren't stable release ones. They get built frequently, usually daily, are on the cutting edge and sometimes can cause issues, so you need to be careful when you do upgrades when using them.
Since you already had 24.10 running on the device, you didn't have to go through re-imaging it again, you can use the built-in sysupgrade tools to move between versions. There are a handful of tools labelled "attended sysupgrade" that build upon the basic sysupgrade by using a custom image builder to retain all of your "extra" packages when doing an upgrade. See https://openwrt.org/docs/guide-user/installation/attended.sysupgrade, and read the threads for the various ASU clients:
The OpenWrt Firmware Selector
LuCI Attended Sysupgrade support thread
Owut: OpenWrt Upgrade Tool
Yup, it's already there and will be included in the next stable release.