Snakes (and turtles, crocodiles, etc) can learn to associate certain things with feed. Crocodiles quickly learn if animals come to the water to drink at the same time of day. Most of these animals will make associations with virtually any stimulus (a smell or sound or the rippling in water or movement of grass or anything else which alerts them to the likely presence of something to eat). Their learning to recognise and attraction to these things isn't 'bonding' or 'love' or 'companionship'. When it happens in captivity it's still not companionship. You can teach them to associate feeding with a bell or particular song or a coloured target or whatever you like.
It's the same thing with a tree or hiding spot they learn is safe. They don't emotionally bond with it as some sort of relationship, they just recognise it as being worthwhile. Same deal with a hide box or human handling them.
Animals can carry out relatively complex behaviours and recognise some interesting connections (correct or not) between events or things and their desires such as perceived safety or feed. They can modify their behaviour to a large extent, but it doesn't mean they are loving anything or emotionally bonding. For example, if you put a pigeon in a box without any external stimuli, let it get hungry, then start adding feed at random intervals, it will associate the thing it did immediately before the first feeding with feeding. For example, if it just flapped its wings before the first time feed fell into the box, it will often flap its wings, even if the feed is introduced at entirely random intervals. If it just shook its head or stretched a leg etc, it will continuously do that for as long as it's in the box. This is without there even being any correlation between feed and the behaviour. If there actually is any correlation, obviously the effect is going to work even more strongly. We actually see humans providing us with themselves as surrogate experiments for us. Just as a pigeon believes it is influencing and interacting with the feed device, we can see that humans make imaginary connections and project feelings on to the animal, even to the extent as we see an example here where someone believed a snake was able to bond with their feet, or that they 'trained' a snake to carry out innate snake behaviour. Observing these humans is as interesting as many of the formal animal experiments which are published, but unfortunately it's generally not possible to publish the best human experiments because of ethical and logistical constraints. It is, however, pretty easy carry out your own experiments on humans (without causing them any harm or them realising it... or if you chose, without causing much harm and them still not realising.... or you can cause more harm and likely end up with varying degrees of harm to yourself). Incidentally, B F Skinner did the pigeon experiment among other very interesting psychological experiments and they're worth a read (searching 'skinner pigeon superstition' should bring this one up). One of the things I loved about studying animal behaviour and psychology at university was that it was so directly applicable to humans, and humans follow many of the same patterns with the same mathematical frequencies, for example, the rate of males and females cheating on their partners is very consistent across most 'monogamous' species - humans included! The proportion of each sex cheating not at all, sometimes and often follows an evolutionary strategy and humans also follow it. The same goes for many behavioural strategies. People think they have free will and make choices, but the vast majority of people behave neatly according to algorithms, and most draw causative assumptions regarding correlations in a similar way to a pigeon, again, with approximately equal accuracy (which is why evolution ended up giving humans and pigeons the same algorithmic strategy).
As for snakes 'affectionately coiling around people and loving them to death'... some people should lose their jobs and be forbidden from ever again being in a position of any more responsibility or authority than that of a cleaner or maybe production line worker.
