There's nothing mandatory about the initial shortcuts - just remove them. It's trivial to change your search engine to Duck Duck Go too.
Maybe I removed them or something. If so, it was relatively easy.
Today I can see that the ads shortcuts can be removed: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/sponsor-privacy
Unfortunately, Firefox is still an ads machine. They keep coming up with “WE PROTECT YOUR PRIVACY” dark patterns to make us gobble up ads.
The worst is getting downvotes every time we point this out. Firefox defenders are extremely bad-faithed, they can’t have a rational discussion about Firefox having mere drawbacks, especially they can’t hear that Firefox misdirects users about privacy and ads.
I didn't down vote you.
No solution is 100% perfect in the tech world. I won't knock them for trying to make some money to keep afloat, even if they aren't (probably) the best at managing money.
I care if I can't turn them off. As you've pointed out, you can do that.
There's no date on your referenced article (pet peeve), so I can't tell when it was done. However it's been a long time (so much I so, I can't even remember) that I've seen ads that I couldn't turn off.