The FIFA countdown is just Phase 1: Mozilla working on full-fledged sports widget
(media.piefed.social)
IMO it's a fairly minor annoyance. Though I think if the forks allow a feature into their codebase and they wanted to disable by default they could, so that's on them. If you use a fork where that's the case then maybe emailing them to say these features should be disabled by default or even not merged at all would be more productive.