And that has already gotten its lead maintainer into trouble over claiming the use of gender-neutral pronouns in the documentation is “political”?

I am not saying that. What I am saying, is that the vast majority of those devs cannot continue full-time work on Firefox when they need to work another full-time job to actually earn money.

If you’re expecting Mozilla to implode and then LibreWolf to be overrun by donations over night, so they can hire all those devs, well, there’s the first problem that LibreWolf doesn’t accept donations. But even if they did, they’d have to hire the management and such of Mozilla, too. It would be Mozilla in a trenchcoat immediately.

I guess, a Mozilla that suddenly can rely completely on donations, can make more decisions that are popular with those making donations. But yeah, you can already donate to the Mozilla Foundation, and so far, people largely don’t.

Will people slowly stop using an outdated browser? yes

will people who are out of a job no longer do their job? also yes

Developers tend to like to get paid. In the absence of an organization that isn’t giving them money to do something as complex as work on a browser engine they tend not to do so out of the goodness of their hearts. They tend to look for jobs at actual companies.