> External table in Snowflake only allows you to ingest data from s3 to their storage

No. External table doesn't do any "ingesting" whatsoever. You can if you want to but you thats not the primary usecase.

https://docs.snowflake.com/en/user-guide/tables-external-int...

" enables querying data stored in files in an external stage as if it were inside a database "

> I have not seen examples of "select * from s3://file.json" in the links you provided.

you cannot directly query a random file off of s3( not sure why someone would want to do that) . Snowflake is a database , not a python script.

You have to build a an external table

" create external table abc location=s3://dir-to-file "

then

" select * from abc "

> "external tables" in Snowflake are not what you think they are.

They are exactly what you think they are. Tables stored externally to snowflake.

Thanks for clarification. I either wasn't able to figure this out back then or things have changes since then.