It’s pretty intuitive in the context of confinement theory. Intuitively we imagine something like a rubber band, as you add energy in the form of tension the material passes a threshold and as you say snaps. For confinement however as you add energy to the system it doesn’t snap, you simply reach the moment when you’ve added enough energy to the system to create a new particle pair that are also confined.
This is the explanation for why when we collide beams of protons at near c they don’t produce a new higher energy particle, but a massive shower of secondary and tertiary particles like pions and kaons as a result of the decay chain from initial pair production.
This is the explanation for why when we collide beams of protons at near c they don’t produce a new higher energy particle, but a massive shower of secondary and tertiary particles like pions and kaons as a result of the decay chain from initial pair production.