even if the management understood that advanced extensions were a major factor for choosing Firefox over the alternatives and were willing to dedicate enough time/people/money to tackling the issue?
my presumption of malice was primarily based on what followed - crippled android addons, forced addon signing on non-Nightly, upcoming adoption of manifest v3. put together, the poweruser experience we had in 2015 is better than the one we have now. and unlike XUL, the only explanation I see for all of these is either malice or stupidity.