People aren’t shitting on Firefox, people are shitting on Mozilla and rightfully so. Mozilla has made many bad decisions, decisions that may call into question the future of Firefox and whether their decisions will compromise it as a privacy friendly browser. After all if Mozilla starts making changes which are harmful towards privacy and hard codes them into the browser, there’s no getting around that with user.js tweaks, that requires more work to fix.

Thankfully there are forks of Firefox but since those depend on the upstream from Mozilla the more they change the harder it is to undo those changes. A manifest V3 style change (which isn’t happening now but could happen in the future if they get into advertising), would be devastating, because even if Librewolf can undo those changes, it’s very likely they would have to implement their own extension distribution system because AMO would very much reject incompatible add-ons in that scenario.

So yeah people do have the right to criticize Mozilla in this regard, this trend has happened before, it will continue to happen in the future. Enshittification is a slow and ugly process, best to catch it in the early stages than to wait it out until you’re already boiling (frog boiling analogy).