These criticisms sound more like they’re from 2003 than 2023. The only time I’ve ever had to “install drivers” when using Linux was back when I had an NVIDIA card, and even then a working open source driver (nouveau) came included by default, as is the case for most peripherals.
If anything the situation is significantly worse on Windows, where you still have to download .msi files from hardware vendors’ websites to get even the most basic shit like wifi working on a clean install, and that’s assuming you already know exactly what’s in your computer to begin with.
That’s fair, but I get the feeling Waterfox wasn’t very profitable for them to begin with.
I personally use it because it fills the very specific niche of re-enabling support for the legacy add-on format by default. You can do this in Firefox and other derivatives, but it’s kind of a pain and it’s easily undone by updates. I don’t know of any alternatives that do the same thing.