This narrative gets endlessly repeated in comment sections despite not even pretending to align with the factual record. The side bets era from roughly 2020-present did not retroactively cause the market share losses from 2010-2015.

The problem with this revisionist history is that it's completely helpless to address the actual dynamics that led to the rise of Chrome, and attempts to tell the entire story in terms of add-ons tweaks to the Firefox user interface, even though that has nothing to do with the change in market share. The major drivers were the world's most visited website pushing a new browser and preloading it as a default on billions of mobile devices. Mozilla could have executed perfectly and still been sidelined.

But a few bad new cycles in the early 2020s crystallized a negative attitude that perfectly fed the hedonic skepticism of Internet comment sections, and so an echo chamber emerged of people reinterpreting that history as if purchasing Pocket or running a VPN somehow retroactively caused all the market share change.

Nobody's ever bothered to like look at the factual timeline, but once they hear it repeated enough they get confident enough to repeat it themselves and on and on the snowball goes.