I’ve searched for so long that I found the documentation of Mozilla saying, on the day of the release, that no, the shortcuts on the home page, can’t be removed.

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.