The point that I'm trying to make here is that even the projects ran by "people who are incensed and motivated enough about this change" need to have the upstre

The point that I'm trying to make here is that even the projects ran by "people who are incensed and motivated enough about this change" need to have the upstream going and be continuously supported. If you say "we can get rid of crappy technology" but you still need the crappy technology to be used by the absolute majority of users, are "we" really getting rid of it? To get "rid" of the crappy technology, "we" must go beyond this piggybacking. "We" need to put resources into an alternative. "We" must ensure that are enough people working on it to satisfy the needs of the majority, not just our own. And unless you are really invested into defending this ideal to the point of sacrificing yourself (or your money/time/resources), you will have to make compromises. For Mozilla, this is coming as sponsored links. For Brave, this is coming as a business model that still deals with ad distribution (although in a model that the users also benefit from it and that are not tracked). You can complain and wish it was different all you want, but at the end of the day the truth is that these compromises do not bother "the community" to the point where they would pay to keep an alternative business around.