They alienate people who can't cope with change - but change is needed if Firefox doesn't want to disappear into irrelevance. They need to have as many communication channels open as they can, and they need to implement features that might pull in new users. They actually go out of their way to make sure new features are optional, so that legacy users can keep their experience, but even implementing the possibility of using LLMs in the browser (which is pretty much a standard thing in browsers nowadays) made these FOSS users screech like harpies - it's not like implementing a side view window (they already had those) that integraties a few API calls was a huge investment in manpower or resources. This behavior extends to the vast majority of FF forks.

I was using Librewolf, Zen Browser and Waterfox (on Android) before. Their immature screeching made me switch back to Firefox after many years. Privacy-wise i am pretty sure the loss of Librewolf's features are more than compensated by being part of a much larger group of people with my browser / extensions choice.