The string of departures and how people communicated around them let me think it’s something a lot less nefarious: Mozilla looked like an extremely political company at the time.

Servo was extremely good at communication with their very frequent news letter and Rust had a lot of wind in its sails, I wouldn’t be surprised if that ruffled the wrong feathers. Mozilla is very much still managed by what remains of its old guards - by that I mean what hasn’t been poached - especially at the top.

That would be pure incompetence from the top management but not malice.