Not quite -- Snowflake allows you to query data directly from S3 without having to ingest it. You can either query the S3 file directly [1], or define an external table on top of it [2]. If the data is JSON, Avro, XML, or some other "semi-structured" format, then Snowflake's "variant" data type makes this type of data very easy to work with. For raw text or log lines, you can still load to Snowflake and process using regex or UDFs. For unstructured or "complex" data like images and PDFs, then you may need to reach for a different compute environment.
Yeah I thought Snowflake external tables would do this but it is not the case.
External table in Snowflake only allows you to ingest data from s3 to their storage (which is also s3 behind the scenes).
Perhaps something has changed since the last time I tried, but when I tried my conclusion was that "external tables" in Snowflake are not what you think they are.
Also I have not seen examples of "select * from s3://file.json" in the links you provided.
[1] https://docs.snowflake.com/en/user-guide/querying-stage.html [2] https://docs.snowflake.com/en/user-guide/tables-external-int...