I think your comment points towards the heart of my complaint, namely, that Firefox stopped extensions on its tracks to offer parity with a browser that doesn't care about extensions. It fits the post's complaint about doing things just because Chrome is doing them.

As for the effect of extensions, my feeling is that people care less about them now but used to care more about them back then. I think Firefox main selling point was always "my cousin who works in IT told me to install this instead of that", and once Firefox angered those power users away (at the same time when Chrome was trying to bring them in) the effect compounded.