I can't agree that it's mischaracterized given that it literally was the source of comments in this thread and just one of numerous instances of that argument I've seen across HN (if you check my user profile, at this point the first two or three pages of my comment history are responding to arguments of this type) and even you seemed to think it was close enough to something you agreed with to be a suitable jumping off point for a different argument borrowing from the same rhetorical momentum.

Sometimes it's the VPN sometimes it's AI, sometimes it's Pocket, sometimes it's about the blockchain, sometimes it's about their VC fund. Generally the idea is that these side bets supposedly siphoned away developer resources and are there reason for the loss of market share which involves a critical misunderstanding of real drivers of market share. So it's quite a prevalent argument. And so far as I can tell, baseless.

So as I said previously, I too care about Firefox and I too am concerned about issues related to ad tech and somehow I don't end up going off the deep end and nodding along to crazy arguments about the VPN.