It's been going in a less friendly direction for a while. Embedding of mandatory useless extensions, aggressive advertising, deals to display more and more content to more users, disregard for user settings on multiple updates, opt-out telemetry, and now telling you that you're using it wrong.
Sure, you can navigate through various settings to disable most of these, and check back on updates for settings that toggles back, or are simply renamed and mysteriously got back to their default, intrusive value. But we should not have to do that.
And that's not even touching the issue with the Mozilla Corporation itself.
Firefox is the alternative browser, but it certainly isn't there to "have your back".
Sure you can. You can also spend time disabling intrusive telemetry, you can also spend time reverting half the UI changes (not the other half though), you can also spend time removing integrated services you don't use but are still running, you can (regularly) change back some settings that gets reverted every once in a while, you can also block some IP to prevent intrusive ads, you can toggle off part of the "user experience" that bloat the lockscreen…
Or you could, I don't know, not have to do any of that and still have a working system that's not trying to bend you over.
I had the occasion to discuss with people involved with Microsoft a few times, mostly on the research front. Great people, with great ideas, and very knowledgeable about their field. Of course they had nothing to do with the lobbying and the windows OS.
Microsoft is very large; the corporate drones are only a small part of it. Unfortunately, it's the part that decides what gets done and pushed out :(
Interesting, we get to either hate them for going full big brother, or hate them for going full adobe in the first place. It's nice to have a choice sometimes.
The "solution" is to curate things, invest massive human resources in it, and ultimately still gets accused of tailoring the results and censoring stuff.
Let's put that toy back in the toy box, and keep it at the few things it can do well instead of trying to fix every non-broken things with it.
That's a very important distinction. While the first part is, to put it lightly, bad, I don't really care what people do on their own. Getting real people involved, and minor at that? Big no-no.