Gross. Browser, tracker blocking, and VPN should ALWAYS be different entities. Forever and always. Their incentives are misaligned at a fundamental level. My machine is the module that should tie the various components together how I see fit.

What company runs this VPN? One of the awful ones I assume?

This seems unfair. You can choose to enable the vpn or not. Free vpns are notoriously awful and ad ridden. Mozilla is providing a genuine high quality free vpn. Many parts of the world experience censorship and don’t have the means to purchase a real vpn. For the record I believe the upstream provider is Mullvad. I don’t always agree with Mozilla leadership but that doesn’t meant we should disparage them for trying to provide interesting features to users.