All they have is the revenue they make from Google, a little bit from their attempts at revenue diversification, and a little bit from their partnerships (like Pocket). If the Google revenue disappears, they won't even be able to maintain the current level of quality.
This Google-controlled narrative is pushed out onto a lot of things (i.e search) which people are slowly starting to realise isn't that complex or expensive to build after all (see Brave Search for example). It's not surprising that Mozilla would echo similar sentiments considering the entire company is controlled opposition.
I also think they do a lot of great stuff around Firefox, the email spoofing is good, the sync function is good, their podcasts and studies are good. Not sure what people mean here.
Mozilla hasn't produced a decent browser for, what, 12 years? They instead take their hundreds of millions of dollars annually to instead spend time building junk like half-baked password managers.
I'd argue that Mozilla's mishandling of Firefox has been killing innovation in this space for years -- it is a giant red flag for anyone wanting to enter the space considering Mozilla's budget and still not being able to produce something of value. The reality is moreso that Mozilla itself doesn't care about building a better browser. It's only when people started to realise this in the last couple of years that we've started to see some new contenders.
Maybe when Mozilla dies, we might start to see open source efforts going to better browsers.