I don't find this persuasive at all. Mozilla wants to frame itself as the browser vendor that cares about privacy, but there are now popular independent browsers like Vivaldi and Orion that go much further than Firefox to protect user privacy, shipping tightly-integrated and fully-featured adblocking out of the box. Firefox on iOS still doesn't natively support adblocking, they weirdly segmented that capability out into a separate "Firefox Focus" product.

Mozilla becoming an advertising company unquestionably warps their incentives and brings them out of alignment with the end user. Tracking-based internet advertising is inherently adversarial and there's no silver bullet or technical approach that magically makes it less so. The fact that their chief partner for this is Meta is deeply disqualifying, given Meta's track record (e.g. Onavo scandal, among a multitude of other things).

There's a ton of real-world value in having Firefox, with a non-Chromium rendering engine, remain relevant in the market. But if Mozilla wants to retain any marketshare at all, they are going to have to compete with other independent browser vendors on UX and privacy. Becoming an advertising company is not the way.