No the "we'll pay for it!" comments were in the context of the staff being let go and departments spun down. We meant, we'll pay to keep this high quality content going.

No one said, sure yeah fire all those folks, flail around for a year, convince people to just give free content for funsies, then we'll slap a price tag on it so the exec bonuses can keep getting higher.

We'd pay for the old Mozilla that cared about a high quality web. That Mozilla appears to be long dead.

When people said “we will pay for it” the decision had already been made, it was too late.

Mozilla is not pay-walling the open documentation, it’s still available. They are pay-walling features that make it easier to save pages, navigate, and use the docs offline.

There are alternatives, in the form of Devdocs.io, Zeal, and Dash, if you want similar features but don’t want to pay Mozilla.

You are not losing anything you already can access to my knowledge.