I think Pale Moon in particular was at least in part marketing itself, whether deliberately or inadvertently, to people who take objection with browser authors

I think Pale Moon in particular was at least in part marketing itself, whether deliberately or inadvertently, to people who take objection with browser authors presuming to make this sort of moral decision on behalf of the user, independently of whether it is right. More generally, hardware and software being neutral tools in the hand of the user rather than forward-deployed submarines for the vendor's agenda (a morally righteous agenda is still an agenda, no matter how negative a sound that word has acquired, just to be sure) has been a sticking point for the Free Software movement pretty much since its conception.