A little surprised to see the sadness regarding something that seemed to be universally scorned whenever it was brought up. I never tried it and don't really have an opinion, but why couldn't this functionality be created as an extension (possibly connecting to a 3rd party service? I don't know why that would be necessary. Can extensions throw stuff into firefox sync?)?

An extension is what it was, before Firefox bought it. It's what it still is, on other browsers.

I used it to save things, and read it on multiple devices. The readability view was never my chief concern.

There was also a period in the history of Pocket where they had influential people share their stories, and shared the top stories on the Web. It was these things that I loved about Pocket. It was a fairly easy way to get a view on the most interesting stories that other people were talking about.

I have had such a hard time finding replacements for this workflow. I built an RSS Reader into Omnivore (Separate from their implementation) to try to emulate it, but it obviously wasn't the same.

Pocket had a lot of potential, and in an era of fragmented media companies - and the paywalling of everything I really think there was an interesting business model around unifying things or acting as a quasi-publisher.

It could have been so much, and in the end it just died. Mismanaged. It's a sad story.

Yes, extensions can save into Firefox Sync.