You're describing the old Firefox before they became Google's controlled opposition. Since 2011 all they have done is continuously stripped out every useful power user feature in a bid to turn into a shitty copy of Chrome; the last straw was gutting their powerful XUL/XPCOM extension system in favor of Chrome's far limited web extensions because muh security (and since then there's been more, not less cross browser malware). Today you can't even write your own extension for use on the main build thanks to forced extension signing (which ended up disabling everyone's extensions a few years ago due to an invalid certificate). And that's before all their unethical tracking, in browser advertising and privacy violation over the years, that requires various 'hardening' about:config changes out of the box, or the erosion of configurable features with almost every release. Mozilla are woke hypocrites today, financially dependent on Google while claiming to be privacy champions and squandering their money on multiple other projects instead of focusing on Firefox. The only browser that continues to be the old Firefox in spirit - the one that upended Microsoft's IE monopoly - is its hard fork, Pale Moon (which gets derided as oLd aNd iNSeCuRe by Mozilla fanboys). Doesn't need any 'hardening' because it doesn't snoop on you to begin with, and the latest versions have massively improved web compatibility while retaining support for the original powerful XUL extension system.

>Firefox came into the mainstream because of power-user recommendations and the browser ballots.

But it was a completely different situation.

- There was a huge influx of new internet users who were all asking their techy friends which browser to use. This is not the case now. People mostly stick with what they know.

- FF was the better product for pretty much all use cases. If this proposal does go through, this will not be the case. It's nice that FF can block ads, but it's ultimately useless if the average user won't be able to access Netflix/Youtube/Facebook/their bank account. It will be an objectively worse browser.