Personally that is what I want. A minimal set of diffs on top of Firefox that turns off anything obnoxious Mozilla might (or might not) add, but is close enough to the original codebase that it can be updated with security fixes right away
There's a 2yo reddit thread [0] in which the Waterfox founder claims that Waterfox balances privacy with usability, and has the advantage of an auto-update feature. This could be outdated as I just installed LibreWolf and there definitely was an auto-update option in the installation dialog.
There's also an article on OnionEngine [1] which compares the two. According to this, Waterfox has support for legacy add-ons, but unlike LibreWolf does not necessarily disable trackers by default. Hard to see how up to date the article is.
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/waterfox/comments/14seevh/comment/j...
[1] https://onionengine.io/blog/waterfox-vs-librewolf/
By the sounds of it, if you have a strong privacy prefence and don't mind compromising usability for the sake of privacy, Libre Wolf may be the better bet.
This is why I ended up choosing Librewolf - I prefer to have more control over where files are stored on the Windows platform. I also took the extra step of creating the TempForPortableApps [1] folder as well.
[0] https://portableapps.com/apps/internet/librewolf-portable
There's a Waterfox Classic, which does, but even that is mostly obsolete these days (add-ons may work, but many websites don't). And I don't think it's getting regular security updates.
It seems https://github.com/arkenfox/user.js is a comprehensive set of settings for that