>Mozilla seems to have forgotten that they survived Chrome by being overtly, explicitly privacy-focused.

I don't think I would agree that they ever actually 'survived' Chrome at all. Mozilla had market share because it was the best thing before Chrome, in largely a pre-mobile era (at least in terms of pools of users that determined who led browser market share.) The focus on privacy was sourced from an ethos that has long existed in the software development community as a kind of baked-in default that I think was broadly shared by a lot of people and depressingly now is regarded as a kind of unique personality twist that the occasional company has.

The onset of Chrome I don't think involved survival, but was instead a steady march toward Chrome gaining dominant market share.