Agreed. Not kidding myself into thinking it would happen. But would be cool if enough of the FF forks were able to form a collective or some body to work on shared effort to develop the main base of the browser in the event (or when) Mozilla calls it quits. The individual forks obviously have their own goals and ideologies that conflict at various levels (LibreWolf and Zen being two obvious examples). But all of them are able to do amazing work with the current base of FF.

Easy to think about, but so much harder to realistically pull off. I know donations are like drops of mist compared to the real money sources for Mozilla. Which would mean such a collective has less of a chance. Though I know a lot of FF users would be willing to donate if they knew it was going directly to the engine/core and not the non-browser stuff. Mozilla more or less seems to really want to be something more like EFF with various efforts not about the browser.

FF went from forcing some amazing demand for breaking away from the fake "standards" MS created and made extensions and tabs normal. To being overwhelmed by Google's version of modern IE, and trying to chase features that even normie Chrome users don't really care about (just really care that the sites they use work). Which aside from conflicting with stated goals, tend to not work with so many sites that now code specifically for Chromium and DRM (not even allowing sites to load if anything but Chromium is detected).

One really great thing FF has going for it is the Android version. Having my extensions (even if some of them need to be side-loaded via activating dev mode) really make browsing on my phones/tablets feel more like my desktop. Not an iPhone user, so I can't speak to the iOS versions. But at least Safari is able to have uBO Lite and other extensions.