The fact that some people don't trust Mozilla enough to enable telemetry but then install a custom build by random developer simply blows my mind.
The latter is more secure in almost every case, in almost every way you can analyse the problem, but at a human level it's easier to trust one person whose name you know over a company where you can't point to any specific individual.
When you know someone personally then perhaps this is a reasonable trade-off to make, but "on the internet nobody knows you're a dog"[1]. People form parasocial relationships with individuals, movements, influencers, etc, and really there's not much to trust about them.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Internet,_nobody_knows_...
An individual may be more likely to agree with your own definition of "malicious".