The really frustrating thing is that the gap hasn't only been growing. Firefox was far slower than Chrome for a long time, and over the past couple of years pulled off a pretty impressive catch-up, which is why I and others finally went back. Now Mozilla's laid off most of the team that executed that very catch-up with Servo. Either my anecdotal experience of the speed bringing people back is an overestimation, or Mozilla's management really are as inept as everyone seems to think.

They laid off most of the engineering team at Firefox already. With that move, and the fact that they are losing market share to their Chromium-based competitors (Edge, Vivaldi, etc.), that put's Google's default search engine deal in question, which is like 90% of Mozilla's funding. Should they lose enough market share that Google decides they don't need them anymore, Firefox is dead overnight.

Agreed, it would also meant the establishment of WebKit (and its variants) as the de-facto rendering engine of the web.