Personally I've been using FF for the last 4 years even though I consider it a worse experience, but I'm becoming disilusioned with it and considering moving to LibreWolf. I'm also interested in trying Orion (by Kagi), but haven't had the time yet.
Librewolf on the other hand is 99% Firefox, for the better (extension) and for the worst (clunkiness).
I've been down this road, honestly just stick with Firefox and disable the relevant setting. It's not worth the time.
And all this while I have to ignore the single biggest negative about Chrome - that it's "run" by Google.
You say you're a developer. I had to tweak my company website myself, not knowing anything about css, html, JavaScript, chrome developer tools were intuitive enough.
Firefox developer tools? even years later, now than I understand well website development, I often still can't figure out how to do stuff.
Worst thing for me is that it's closed source. They can claim whatever they want, if they can't prove it, I cannot really trust them.
Because of crippling defects in Safari (pages just not loading, hyperlinks not being recognized as such, clicks doing nothing), I decided to go back to Firefox. This was made feasible by the availability of a bookmark-syncing facility across devices.
But... wow it's painful. On mobile, the bookmarks are buried under layers of inexplicable and unneeded menus. It's infuriating to use.
On the desktop, the storage of log-in credentials is only half done. It'll remember what user ID you might have used for a site, but it then fails to select the password associated with that ID. It just presents a giant list of every password for every ID you might have used on the site. You have to scroll through them all, and sometimes there are duplicates. Why?
Then there's the inability to specify that new tabs should open on your home page. Instead, new tabs have to open on the Mozilla home page, which presents a search bar that's useless. When you start typing in it, a giant search panel erupts from the top of the screen and the cursor jumps into it. WTF? Who thought that was good design?
I will probably just go back to Safari, because I refuse to support Google's shit. But what's going on with Firefox? They're putting dev time into the garbage reported in this article, and ignoring glaring defects that are driving Firefox's already tiny market share away.
Firefox as browser-only browser is perfectly good for me. The surrounding UI is almost transparent to me, as if it did not exist.
The only point of contact between your and mine experiences are the bookmarks on mobile. I don't use them. I pin the sites I use most on the page that opens when pressing the new tab button and those are my bookmarks. Unfortunately there are only 16 possible pinned sites there but I'm not even using all of them. Most of the times I tap the URL bar, type one or two letters and Firefox autocompletes the sites I want to see. Example: I tap n and it suggests news.ycombinator.com. Faster than any bookmarks menu.
Anyway. If most users follow your workflow, Mozilla are not doing a good job. If most users follow my workflow, they are wasting a lot of engineering time in features we don't use. IMHO Firefox users are mostly power users so I think there are at least ten different workflows competing for the top spot and whatever Mozilla does people will be mostly upset. It's not an easy place to be.
I also don't sync tabs, so I'm not talking about that at all. Just bookmarks.
I wish more privacy advocate websites mentioned this. Not sure what these one-sided stories achieve other than pushing "might as well use Chrome then" conspiracies.