Differential Backups with Replication?
I used to manage an environment where we had transactional replication and the backup schedule was Weekly Full, Daily Diff and log backups several times per day.

The backups didn't have any effect on replication. We had a few dozen publications consisting of hundreds of articles. If we had an issue with one, we would reset it and it would simply snapshot the tables in that publication.

The way it worked was that SQL did something similar to a select * from the tables involved along with reading their schema and uploading them to snapshot files on the distributor.  Then it dropped or truncated the destination tables on the replica server and used the files to rebuild them.