The strange thing is that as far as I get, Mozilla didn't fire a single ff dev. Servo - yes, mdn - yes, but they actually want to focus on FF and transfered people from the servo team to the core product.
The only parts of Servo that could realistically be ported into Gecko within the next couple of years have already been ported. Servo's DOM engine would be the last major remaining piece, but that would be a very, very long-term project.
According to your link, developer tools and internal tooling/infrastructure teams took a cut. The effects will mostly be indirect.
Internal tooling and infrastructure teams that work on Firefox are still Firefox teams though. If you work on the build pipeline you still count as a Firefox development in my book.
They were not very clear on where the cuts are, but here is the quote from the linked article:
"In order to refocus the Firefox organization on core browser growth through differentiated user experiences, we are reducing investment in some areas such as developer tools, internal tooling, and platform feature development, and transitioning adjacent security/privacy products to our New Products and Operations team," Baker wrote.
The article prepends the paragraph with another sentence to impose its own interpretation on it, but the way I read it is that the browser division is reorganized around the user experience and everything else is moved in products and operations. Not sure how to highlight the words "browser growth".
Regarding Servo, the project is killed and part of the people had been kicked out, but the rest were merged with the core engine team. My understanding is that Mozilla decided that even Google is not doing two browser engines at the same time and decided to move the old one to rust the evolutionary way.
Did they fired someone from the ff team? Maybe, but I don't think that it is because the browser is no longer important for them. The fact that they moved there best rust devs to it testifies that at least they are not giving it up so far.
I think the sentence you've quoted makes it clear that cuts have happened to certain Firefox teams.
Now, we can argue about what the effect is of this cuts is but at least you have to accept that some Firefox teams have received cuts and likely those people have either been moved or dismissed.
When you say they moved their best Rust devs onto Firefox, yes but in part that is possible because they have made cuts to the Rust toolchain teams.
The teams were downsized, but I'm not sure what happened to the people because it was bundled with the products and operations team. This is what I meant. Not a hill worth dying for though. It will be most clear if someone knows what the Taiwan office were doing because they were hit the hardest as far as I get.
Regarding the rust toolchain, all the FAANG are using rust one way or another. The project is healthy and Mozilla is not key there already. I'd even say that it would've been ugly if a non-profit corporation had to pay for the development of tools that trillion dollar companies are using.
From their message, it's not clear to me how COVID-19 is to blame for the layoffs. Especially in Taiwan, since Taiwan has been among the best in the world[1] at handling the pandemic and is doing relatively well.
Did Google reduce their payments in the new search deal because people search less when they work remotely due to COVID-19?
Did Mozilla reduce investment in tooling because developers' need for tools is reduced by COVID-19?
I think what they're referring to is that COVID has damaged the advertising industry from which Mozilla receive royalties but in fact the problem is much more likely to be that only a small minority continue to use Firefox.
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