Let me pay for Firefox

I am always surprised Rust came out of that org.

But not surprised that they canned the team & cancelled the project. It thrived outside Mozilla.

How? How does one corp mess things up this bad?

That was Eich-era, and the org was very different then.

They're not a real corporation in the "making profit by shipping widgets" sense. They've been funded by a huge annual grant from Google. So none of the management understands in their bones how money is made or how money is necessary for a company to survive. They have never built a successful, profitable product.

Instead of play-acting as a corporation, they might have decided to become a non-profit software foundation, which would have been a very honourable thing to do. But they have not, for example, built up a huge war-chest in case the Google spigot ever stops. Instead senior management has frittered the money away on their own salaries and absurd money-losing projects and acquisitions.