You either die an open source project, or live long enough to see yourself become ad-driven in the name of sustainability.

Firefox has already done so to google, and when a fork is big enough, they certainly will hear the siren's call.

Did you read the same article as me? The word is singularly used in the context of how do you earn money as a project, i.e. sustain the effort. It's a bit of a leap to imply this is impure unless they made some contract stating the opposite or are doing something dark.

I mean first thing I do in any browser is change the search engine so it's not like it affects me in any way. I don't expect opensource projects to never make deals that give them some money, I just want them to be fully transparent when they do. Waterfox is transparent and clearly states who and how they sell their user data to.

You can however of course swap out the default Search Engine with Google or whatever privacy focused replacement (e.g. DuckDuckGo, Kagi, etc).

Have you ever sent a donation to Alex?