Compensation is complicated and function of value added to the organization may not correlate to work put in. I have no opinion on what should be cut, just pointing out it won't the end of Mozilla without Google deal.
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For anyone who wants to know what the other side of the compensation discussion would go like..
One could argue though the Mozilla leadership has also more than quadrupled their revenue from $150M in 2011 to $690M in 2024, despite loosing market share, revenue generated from their only competitor no less. It isn't a easy job to convince your competitor to be your primary source of income to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars and keep increasing that every year.
Yes, Google is not funding the search deal out of the goodness of their hearts, but they also don't have to pay $500M+ per year to keep Mozilla alive if that is all they cared about.
Such a deal doesn't happen without a ton of work by Mozilla to build relationships, show value of paying 500M to Google etc.
If the leadership can no longer generate the growth/value they too will face the music sooner or later. Mozilla still would need competent people(this group or another) to be able make the deals to pivot to other revenue sources and they don't come cheap.
A for profit subsidiary of a non-profit in software world will always end up paying what looks like generous compensation perhaps even compared to the market for similar roles in pure for-profit companies, because unlike those companies, Mozilla cannot offer stock compensation on top of cash.
