It's not defeatism at all. I think it's just important to acknowledge that a browser, or software at the scale of Microsoft is real work, these are objectively gigantic engineering efforts and not all of the people at those firms are stupid.
If you're really smart and you say "I can do it with half or a quarter of the resources with hindsight", sure I might give you the benefit of the doubt, but if you're going to claim you can do it with 0.1% of the resources in a volunteer Discord server effort, no. Not because I wouldn't be happy if that was possible, but because that's not how the world works. Linux is being able to compete with Microsoft because there are now large billion dollar companies like RedHat, Steam and others investing into the development. It takes real money and developer time.
And that's the second point, Mozilla has to make these compromises because they are one of the few companies that actually maintains an independent software project at this scale. And if any other competitor ever wants to get there, they'll need to answer these funding questions too. Even if they're ten times as clever, they'll still need tens or hundreds of millions.
If you're really smart and you say "I can do it with half or a quarter of the resources with hindsight", sure I might give you the benefit of the doubt, but if you're going to claim you can do it with 0.1% of the resources in a volunteer Discord server effort, no. Not because I wouldn't be happy if that was possible, but because that's not how the world works. Linux is being able to compete with Microsoft because there are now large billion dollar companies like RedHat, Steam and others investing into the development. It takes real money and developer time.
And that's the second point, Mozilla has to make these compromises because they are one of the few companies that actually maintains an independent software project at this scale. And if any other competitor ever wants to get there, they'll need to answer these funding questions too. Even if they're ten times as clever, they'll still need tens or hundreds of millions.