I personally wouldn’t necessarily mind if it tied into it indirectly, but if they just directly end up cloning/growing Snoke in this show then that would be pretty frustrating.

The moment they confirmed that Snoke was a strand-cast shortly after they’d brought it up in chapter 7 I figured they connect the two in the EU somehow, but I really do hope they won’t make any blatant connections between this show and the ST. I hope they understand that the Mandalorian fans aren’t necessarily ST fans, as especially since there’s so much time between the two canonically that they’ll only do a loose connection and focus on their own story instead. They can always just have a failed clone/strand-cast of the child and end it at that for this show, and then later in some novel or comic make Snoke a later attempt based on the same experiments…or something like that.

EDIT:

Come to think of it, the clones/strand-casts seen in this episode are probably meant to fill those dark armors we saw in the last few shots. If not, then that last shot with wide shot with Gideon wouldn’t make much sense.

They probably will add some kind of loose connection to Snoke and Exegol in the EU, but I think this show is currently doing its own independent thing.

Maybe my Jedi Outcast vibe wasn’t that far off and Gideon wants to create force-sensitive stormtroopers kind of like the shadowtroopers in Legends.