> I'm sure a lot of HN readers view any of Mozilla's operations outside of Firefox as a distraction

For most people, Mozilla is just the company developing Firefox and Firefox is the Mozilla product. Mozilla's pivot into the web's hero is coming at the price of Firefox and people are not happy. Their current situation where they depend financially on Google just doesn't feel right. And I understand that Google has been asked to stop financing Mozilla. Tough times will be coming for them