The petition should instead be asking Mozilla to allow people to directly donate to Firefox development.
The Mozilla Foundation is what you can donate to, and you can do it because it's a non-profit. But it doesn't make Firefox. It owns Mozilla Corporation, which does. And it can't just dump donated money into Mozilla Corp either; regulators are not naive.
But yeah, part of the problem is probably the fact that the Mozilla Foundation isn’t the one employing Firefox devs.