This was a terrible mistake by Mozilla, but a test pilot for a limited number of users doesn't seem permanently worse than what Google does in regards to privacy.

Moreover, this presumably didn't affect users who installed via a package manager, while with Chrome the installation method doesn't matter.

However I wish Mozilla was publicly funded, so that they don't have to constantly search for alternative revenue sources.

Irrelevant whataboutism. It doesn’t matter what Firefox does, the article is about Google Chrome/Chromium.