The following is my personal impression of the situation, which I base on following everything Mozilla closely for almost as long as it existed, particularly closely in the most recent years. I also have seen both Baker and Surman speak - as well as Eich and Beard many others of note - both in public talks but also in smaller, more private conversations. And I saw a lot of internal mozilla discussion over the years and talked to quite a few people. While I was active in the mozilla project for some time, I have never been on their payroll, neither as an employee or contractor.

Right now mozilla is very much beholden to the whims of the their CEO and has been for a while (when interim-CEO and before that when Mozilla Foundation chairwoman). Baker - additionally to being the current CEO of the Corporation - chairs the board of directors of both, the Foundation and the Corporation. The current Mozilla Foundation president, Surman, is her long-time yes-man, as well. Chris Beard, former CEO taking reign after Eich's departure - was a Baker yes-man as well.

She managed to surround herself with an army of yes-people. She effectively is a "(benevolent) dictator" like a SV billionaire would be, except the billionaire probably wouldn't spend so much mozilla money on themself and their cronies.

To be fair, Baker played an instrumental role in getting Netscape to release the initial code and setting up the Foundation, and was a good steward of the Foundation for a long time.

She played a bit of a role in what started the downfall of mozilla (peaking at burning stacks on money on FirefoxOS; tho some good work came out of it that, it's still a huge net negative), but it was mostly other people who were a little bit... too enthusiastic about what mozilla can achieve, spreading resources thin.

After the failure of FirefoxOS, mozilla leadership got scared and clueless what to do next, and looked for Baker to provide leadership.

But Baker lacks the "product" vision (Firefox had to come from other people as a hobby project, even FirefoxOS started out that way), is more interested in pet projects and dominating them. E.g. the way the CoC was handled; I am not saying a CoC in itself is bad, but the way it was handled and communicated caused major rifts between the leadership and the volunteers, leading to a lot of especially the most experienced "valuable" volunteers shrugging and resigning and changing focus to other projects.

The Eich (and gerv) situation - which wasn't helped by Baker, to say it politely - furthermore created a talent vacuum at the top of the Corporation, and eventually was "resolved" by filing it with unsuited candidates - specifically Baker's yes-man Chris Beard, who was too much of a marketing guy and figurehead to be an effective leader in the CEO role. (I am not commenting on, analyzing or defending Eich's reasons for donating to Prop 8, which made same-sex marriages illegal in California until it was reversed by a court later)

Since the ousting of Eich, and even a little before that, it appears to me, the culture turned from a more or less productive "togetherness" (with it's share of clashes, of course) to an outright cold war between the Baker camp and many of the actual tech staff (and few remaining tech-centered managers). A lot of very good, very idealistic "true believer" people lost their faith and took the golden parachute to the FAANGS, something I would have never expected from a lot of them a few years earlier. Of course, priorities and opinions shift over the course of a life, and not everybody who left did so because of the situation at mozilla - some surely did to seek new challenges or advance their career - but it's still staggering to see the exodus of long-time believers, employees and volunteers alike, over the least 5 or so years.

I remember sitting in the audience of the 2013 mozilla summit (Eich hadn't left mozilla yet, of course) and seeing the constant stream of the leadership talk about "changing the world", "1 million mozillians", proclaiming how "FirefoxOS and BrowserID" will empower users, and all that moonshooting marketing stuff. I distinctly remember the negative impression Baker and Pete Scanlon left me with. And I remember the extreme overuse of the word "Awesome". I remember looking left and right to my fellow (mostly volunteer) pals, looking as confused as me, and that one Baker-friend (forgot her name) sitting rather close to us in the audience, constantly whooing and howling in approval. I remember talking to a lot of (new to me) people from all things mozilla during the summit, and most everybody was as confused as me, and far from being as excited and optimistic as the leadership had been, and very skeptical about the use of resources and leadership priorities. It was not my first big mozilla event, but it was the first one which had a Kafkaesque "corporate" "management decided" feel to it, instead of a community networking event of a diverse community working towards a common goal.