I'm using it for stuff that doesn't work without Chromium (like a translation tool that doesn't break SPA forms) but yeah not being able to use my custom adblockers concerns me.

Waterfox is better, it’s open source, not based on chromium and has a split DNS resolution path through their own servers and cloudlfare. A few tweaks in about:config and it’s by far the best option out there.

AI features should be opt in, not opt out. Every time it updates it also often turns those features back on (at least a couple times for me)

the problem with Firefox AI implementation was more of a communication issue.

It's a purity race to oblivion : people who know and care use Firefox. They switched away from the default and by that very action they are in the tiny minority who actually has a grasp at problems and dare try to do something about. They are vocal about it, put efforts into the process so they in general want "more" and "better" according to their own criteria. It doesn't stop there though, once they have moved away for privacy or open source or sovereignty or whatever else, they want the other criteria and it won't stop.

It is recursive though, people who care a lot about some criteria move away from Firefox, the now "mainstream" within that community, then use e.g. Waterfox or LibreWolf. You can see this in any community which moves away from the mainstream choice really. There is a vocal minority within the minority and they do have genuine reasons and concern.

Once you use LibreWolf I bet there are other forks, etc, etc.

For those people what Firefox is doing is actually very bad because it goes back to what they wanted to move away from.

If you really need Chromium ... just use Chromium?

It's a private compnay, they don't have to follow shareholders so it explains it