The FOSS launcher Lawnchair is actually pretty great. Took some setting up, but now it does everything nova did for me.
Sideloading though, yeah I really hope that doesn’t go through. Fun fact even now I can’t use a local gov’t because I have an accessibility service running that was ‘sideloaded’ (it’s from Lawnchair, if you want double tap to lock you need it)
You (the end user) decide how you want to use the internet. The forks you’re probably angry about are the ‘hardened forks’, but whether or not you care about their goals and want to use those is a choice only you can make. Most of what they do is basically change some default configs and remove some ‘bad’(according to the maintainers and the users) features.
There’s also forks like zen that under the hood use firefox, but customize the user experience significantly.
A bunch of forks just add extra functions, patches or defaults on top of firefox. It’s not a hard fork as in they maintain everything themselves, they’re still based on the latest official firefox releases.
Removing AI is one of those patches yes.
Imagine the response if a Muslim nation bombed a school full of white Christian kids.