But as an edge user it feels pretty "mummy and daddy are fighting" Stupid.
Mozilla is the party that lost out here - not debian. Mozilla basically reduced their brand presence for a decade for no benefit whatsoever. Debian still got the browser, but under a different name.
Back then perhaps there was not enough context to know that Debian could be trusted.
The interesting thing is that the pain actually did go both ways. The lack of Firefox and the need for Iceweasel actually confused me as a young developer, and put me off Linux for a long time, because it made it feel like a cheap knock-off. I was unaware that they were otherwise identical.
You are implying that it is clear-cut that Debian is trustworthy here. In practice Debian did, and continues to do, heavy patching of packages to their needs, sometimes contrary to upstreams wishes. Iirc one of the issues here was the bug reports that Mozilla received that were in reality Debian-specific
That said, I used Debian, and didn't mind seeing iceweasel. It was kind of amusing, in fact.
You can.. I mean people know this right.. You can download software on Linux and run it just like on Windows.
The Windows model of zero trust in the bad way feels absolutely bizarre in comparison.
ie: the recent removal of patent encumbered codecs from Mesa
People expecting Canonical-levels of disregard are bound to be disappointed