I'm always baffled by vitriol like this. The alternatives you mention wouldn't even exist without Firefox, and what bloody swamp? What forced extensions?

I just started a two fresh profiles to test your claim (one in Firefox, one in Dev Edition), the opt-out for telemetry is present in the very first dialogue box and costs 2 clicks. There's a daily usage ping that's still on, and I'm happy to keep it on, because I believe that usage stat is valuable. It's easily disabled.

There are zero extensions by default, and one video decoding plugin. There is a skippable 'recommended add-ons' step on first run, so skip it if you want, easy.

The AI controls are all set to Available but none are automatically used, one must intentionally do so, at which point one is reminded these can be entirely disabled. Even opening the AI chat sidebar doesn't actually connect to a bot, it offers a list of bots, beneath which is a Close button, though that's not the only way to close it.

If you prefer Waterfox, great, you're not the primary target demographic for Firefox, but you can still use it without all the pain you complain of.