That is true - Firefox is definitely held to a higher standard here and elsewhere. They marketed those values to us. So the criticisms, in my opinion, are definitely justified. And no, they aren't listening to their users.

If they had listened to their users they would have delivered what every users wants - just a browser. Not some kind of "platform" stuffed with lot of unwanted crap that makes it bloated and introduces possibly new unnecessary attack vectors in it (both malicious and / or privacy exploits). All those additional crap that every new management wants in Firefox should have been a browser extension or a plugin, instead of being bundled into the core browser. When a user installs / updates Firefox, they could be asked if they want to install any of these new feature available as an extension / plugin. That keeps the browser lean, transfers the choice completely to the user and is genuinely respectful of the user. The current way of force bundling everything into the browser, making it bloated, and then pretending that "users can opt-out" is not just arrogance but also misleading (to be polite) as it is common knowledge among software firms that most people often never change the default settings.

Think about it ... if every of these controversial features - Pocket, ads in address bar or home page, AI etc. etc. - had been made available as user opted extension or plugin, would there ever have been any controversies? The installation data itself would provide a feedback of how much the users actually care about these features, and provide unique insights to the management into the kind of user base that it has (which the article is spot-on about).

(Note that I know that some of these features are indeed implemented as an extension. But not as user controlled ones as they cannot be completely uninstalled. All the user can do is disable it (turn "off or on"). Why? It is stuff like this that makes it harder to trust claims of caring about user Privacy.)