As a former Mozilla donor, I think this blog post communicates “we have more money than we know what to do with.”

Donations to Mozilla don't (probably can't, legally) go to Firefox development. Mozilla Foundation is a charity, Mozilla Corporation is a for-profit enterprise. Money can flow from the Corp to the Foundation but not in reverse.

So if you give money to the Foundation, the Corporation has to give less to the Foundation to keep it funded. You could as well have given money directly to the Corporation.

Depends on if the Foundation is tax deductible (501c in USA?).

Some bad managers outright encourage unnecessary redesigns. It's a lot easier and often cheaper to change the product's skin than lead a dysfunctional dev team through fixing crippling tech debt or adding meaningful new features.

I have a theory that we're almost always in a design bubble.

Look back in the history of most major brands, icons and trademarks and the ones that most people would consider classic all seem to come from two or three distinct eras.

The rest can be viewed as "what the hell were they thinking/smoking?", cargo culting the current fashion and much jumping on bandwagons.

Looking at tech, designers have held very little power historically. Examples are few and far between, with Apple being the most notable outlier. Old Apple did not change the status quo much - it was a golden child for less than a decade after all - the 80s and 90s saw very little tech companies where designers were calling the shots. Only when New Apple rose from the ashes did tech start to deeply prioritize value design. Nowadays, many startups have design cofounders, major companies like Airbnb or Dropbox regularly and prominently show the influence of their design teams, and so on.

It definitely feels like an overcorrection right now - many designers will surely be amongst the first to go in the next recession.

(As far as fields other than tech, they’re all completely different stories regarding their relationship to visual design)

Design it how it works, not how it looks.

That is the biggest problem with the current "designer" bubble.