It is donation funded with no reliance on outside parties. They don't have to inject ads into pages like brave did or sell out to Google compromising their independence on web standards.
They're ahead of Servo already anyway, and better funded.
In the last 24h alone Chromium merged almost 900 CLs (their equivalent to a pull request) into the src/Chromium repo, Ladybird had 7. Yes a project that started fresh a couple of year ago with decades of hindsight can be more efficient than one started 16 year ago as the fork of a fork, but if I had to guess they'll sooner or later reach a point where they have implemented the low hanging fruit and chromium moves faster away than they can catch up.
In the last 24h alone Chromium merged almost 900 CLs (their equivalent to a pull request) into the src/Chromium repo, Ladybird had 7. Yes a project that started fresh a couple of year ago with decades of hindsight can be more efficient than one started 16 year ago as the fork of a fork, but if I had to guess they'll sooner or later reach a point where they have implemented the low hanging fruit and chromium moves faster away than they can catch up.