[blacklight]

It depends on how much Firefox enshittifies. If it's just about removing some telemetry configuration from upstream, then a couple of downstream patches will still do the job. If, say, Firefox decides to fully embrace the spyware business model and drop support for Manifest V2 in order to kill adblockers, then LibreWolf will probably have to maintain their own fat piece of logic built on top of Firefox. Keeping it as a soft fork would then be a lot of work (you'd basically have a patchset of tens of thousands LoC to keep porting through different versions of Firefox). And making it a hard fork would be even more work (it basically means that the LibreWolf folks are on their own and they have to maintain their own independent browser).

[account42]

Maybe a hard fork would be more manageable if the scope was reduced to just web browsing instead of trying to be an app platform.