Unfortunately in the world of OSS, neither of those are enough to pay the bills unless you have a lucrative partnership (i.e. Google paying to be the default search engine in Firefox, which is now no longer the case).
However, there is the whole issue about the money that they were spending on CEO salary, the related bonus, and all the activities about who knows what, instead of Firefox and Thunderbird.
The empowered userbase would then direct Mozilla to make other solutions for their most pressing needs (maybe search or email or anti tracking) instead of the lame ideas they have wasted resources on
(You might wonder why they spent so much money on it. A lot of people wondered that, and apparently Mozilla itself has now wondered about it too.)
> A lot of people wondered that
It seems pretty obvious why they would do it, and it has been widely admired. I hadn't heard comments like yours until the pile-on in on this page.