I switched from gmail to another provider and I just couldn't get rid of "gmail" when searching for "mail"

deleting and re-importing history/bookmarks did nothing, but what did eventually work was opening the sqlite table and deleting the rows manually...

Silly question and I know I can google it but how hard was it to change the sqllite table? (identifying the records, etc..)

very easy

I found the file with strings | grep (was "places.sqlite")

sqlite3 places.sqlite then found the row with .dump, then deleted with DELETE FROM moz_places WHERE id = XXX:

They do, it's called Firefox ESR.

I tried that a few years ago, but within months they overrode my update preferences and policies.json file to force push an update that broke functionality I use. That and some other really annoying decisions are why I never recommend Firefox to anyone any more. I grudgingly use it as the current least worst option but would love to bail if there were options.