Small snap loop devices visible in gnome-disk-utility OR what is the function of snap ubuntu-core

Each individual snap is a read-only squashfs filesystem image. In order to access files within these images, snapd mounts the images, one for each installed snap version, inside /snap.

This list of mounted loop devices thus effectively includes the snaps you have installed, and is part of the normal operation of snapd. You should not attempt remove them. If you really don't want them there at all, then you can remove the corresponding snaps.

Various utilities are designed to show you all mounted filesystems, including loopback ones, which is why you see them. snapd is the first common daemon I've seen to maintain a large and variable set of loopback mounts in this way, which admittedly does hamper the UI of these utilities. Perhaps eventually we'll see these utilities hide loopback mounts by default.

You can remove old core by execute

sudo snap remove core --revision <number>

manually.

If you don't use snaps it than just uninstall them as you did. Ubuntu core is the snap that the others snaps need to run. Visiblity of snaps in gnome-disk-utility is probably not wanted but it's a side effect of how snaps are working.