It does not show up in the UI once disabled, does not re-enable again and does not pester the user into enabling it again as proprietary software often does.

I can understand criticism on the development time that may have been better spent, but less criticism against the existence of something that is fairly easily disabled and not user-hostile in intent.

I disabled the AI stuff immediately on my side (through the regular UI, not about:config settings) and never saw anything AI-related in Firefox afterwards.

It's worrying seeing Firefox getting so much more criticism than all the more user-hostile browsers that end up benefiting from such somewhat unwarranted criticism against the most popular non-hostile browser.

> I need things I don’t want to use to not appear in the UI.

Couldn't have said it better myself. Similarly, current youtube is unusable without element blocking and custom CSS editing. Unfortunately there doesn't seem to be a way to remove UI elements from Firefox, no?

Different people want different features. Insisting Firefox never shows you anything you personally don't use is a bizarre unworkable demand.