Maybe in an alternate timeline, where the mozilla good-faith budget had not been severely diminished by years of questionable policy and technical decisions - there might be a legitimate argument to made here, with adequate signposting, for maybe putting forth some version of this experiment to investigate a possible harm reduction measure to surveillance advertising.

We don't live in that timeline.

Firefox is really important. I want it to continue to be a viable independent browser, and a viable base for alternative browsers.

I still think it is the best option, but it continues to get harder and harder to make that case. And I really want Mozilla to deeply reflect on why I, and many others, feel that is the case.

Reading the new replies from Bobby Holley (Mozilla CTO) on that reddit thread (why was this statement only published on reddit?)...

I'm struck by the fact that every reply places emphasis the technicalities of the feature rather than the actual root cause of concern here - people feel as if their consent was violated by the automatic enabling of a feature that they assessed was not in their best interests (for good reasons).

There is no getting around that with privacy engineering.