@frumble It's not that simple. A big part of how the situation ended up where it did, is precisely the complexity of the project - and the history of Firefox means that it has not only accumulated a lot of technical debt over the years, but also that the design choices made in its development process were often optimized for short-term results over long-term maintainability and sustainability.

Or to put it differently: if you try to take over a project that was developed to corporate standards, you will need to emulate all of the same corporate dynamics to be able to do that, because those are the assumptions about the environment that will have been encoded in the design. That just sets us up for the same kind of failure again, 10 years from now.

There is therefore a significant benefit to developing a new browser engine from a different set of principles; those of a community-led project where you cannot assume the existence of funding, which recognizes that sustainable maintainability by a potentially small set of maintainers is the most important metric.

(Also, the oft-repeated "don't rewrite your software" advice is related to rewriting for *technical* reasons. That is not the context here, and so you cannot just port over the rationale 1:1 and assume it to hold true.)