If there was a serious financial effort that went into a fork of Firefox, I'd be all on board with it. The problem is these knockoffs that you know aren't going to keep up with development and will be relatively short-lived.

Say what you want about Brendon Eich, but I wish he forked Firefox for Brave. That's the kind of effort that Firefox deserves, because it's by no means a bad browser. Putting aside some relatively minor performance issues (that don't manifest with average use), it's a great browser and I hope it sticks around for the sake of still allowing a good level of ad-blocking and such.

And yes, Firefox pretty much still exists in this form because of Google. That relationship has also accelerated the decline of Mozilla.