"Pale Moon? What???" -- 99% of the world. It has 0.06% marketshare.
If you have a way for Firefox to make money without corporate support I am all ears, but fundamental idealism isn't going to solve anything for Firefox, it will just cause Mozilla to go extinct. I'd rather have them around than not.
And close enough to zero top-tier developer hours as to make no odds, so the "democratic decisions" would make no actual difference to an app that would be suddenly dead in the water.
Yeah, I would love to see a fierce, wholly independent Mozilla both doing the technical ass-kicking it's been doing, and with a much freer hand in user advocacy. But if Mozilla's income were to be cut off, everyone would suffer: they would suddenly have zero momentum with which to continue either their technical excellence or their existing, worthwhile advocacy efforts.
Pale Moon is proof enough of that - the platform is viable, and people care about it. If Firefox were to discard the wrongheaded choices, I'm pretty sure sure that the PM community would fold back in. Rather than saying, "oh maybe there's a reason Mozilla Corp's not using the money for real advertising", users would still be going out like we did in the early '00s and building word-of-mouth to support a product worth supporting.
Corporations do not exist to "play nice". They exist to overtake, consume, and ultimately to destroy. Google has almost fully overtaken the Web for corp backers. Mozilla needs to develop the guts to take it back for the users.