You can still mod Firefox's UI pretty easily, its all defined by CSS files and not too difficult to customize. I for instance actually did the opposite of what you wanted and completely got rid of the tab bar cause I use Sidebery for tab management: https://i.imgur.com/cHz1clI.png Theres a whole subreddit for it even: https://www.reddit.com/r/FirefoxCSS/
(Also Firefox breaks it once a year or so.)
Not sure how much this is lack of developer effort vs lack of support from Firefox.