There's been community forks of it since then that I switched to and will continue to use instead. Grouping tabs at the top is much worse UX than an entire page you can drag and drop around, and blatantly copying Chrome.
What percent of their users even have telemetry enabled? Mozilla always pulls this crap, using these biased telemetry numbers as a fig leaf to drop genuinely useful features. Luckily they still allow for community modification.
Sadly, this seems to be the general purpose of telemetry. If the gathered statistics can be contorted to justify doing something you wanted to do anyway, then telemetry will be used for just that. If it says something else, just ignore it and say you don't have enough resources or something.
Proponents suggest it is necessary to improve software. Microsoft has extensively used telemetry for at least 10 years in Windows, does that feel improved to anyone during that time? I'm of the opinion they largely used it to identify what existing features users were still being productive with so they could be enshitified next.
There's been community forks of it since then that I switched to and will continue to use instead. Grouping tabs at the top is much worse UX than an entire page you can drag and drop around, and blatantly copying Chrome.