Mozilla's funding comes almost entirely from the Google search deal. They can't afford to let the user count continue to dwindle on a principled stance alone. They either need to find workable alternative income of the same scale (which they've tried at least a dozen things that didn't pan out) or try to focus on what the average user wants in a browser rather than what the GNU fan power user comments in tech forums. They don't need a few principled people to stick with it, they need to be popular with the average person again.
Unless you can show increase in userbase with any of the BS Mozilla has done recently against their community, I'm not sure how I can agree with you.
They started this around 2015. One freaking decade with zero results. Apart from increase in Mitchell Baker's salary YoY, I dont see anything else increasing. In fact they sold Rust and MDN to their competition.
Most importantly, community unrest has only increased. Not decreased. And the userbase dwindling aligns with the same. So tell me, make me, a "GNU fanboi" understand how I am being unreasonable.
The 200 million normal users can also recommend trying to use Firefox all the time to their friends again, they just don't have a reason to do so because often, for their cares, Chrome and others are the ones with better target to them. Pre-installs is definitely a problem, as it always has been, but it never stopped Firefox before.
If the non-tech person wakes up one day and decides privacy is a key concern for the browser then they join the few that learn about each in this detail and pick from there and the niche has a new member. When things like 1,000,000,000 people wake up and decided mobile performance and battery life were important for years it resulted in Firefox having next to no presence on mobile more than any other reason.