Use Waterfox or Librewolf. Or Zen. Or some other fork.

I have started regularly donating to foss projects, especially those who are clear on their limits of ai in code. Been donating to signal for years too.

Check the box and forget the feature ever existed until you install the browser again from scratch. It's been there for 5 years, so it's not exactly a new or unsolved problem.

I would pay for Firefox if they kept updates like that off by default. Maybe they could have a screen that shows new options you can turn on which I'd happily ignore most of the time. It obviously takes tons of time to build a web browser so I expect it to get paid for somehow, but yeah, the on-by-default enshittification is no good.

as someone else suggested, a fork is the best way to go. if you are most concerned about privacy, Liberwolf is the way to go. if you want privacy, but aren't willing to go as far as Librewolf does, then Waterfox is a solid alternative that provides better privacy than Firefox.

Signal is funded by donations. They got a few pretty big ones a while ago from some wealthy donors, so I don't know whether the donations by normal people by now are enough to cover their costs. I try to donate a bit though, at least enough to cover my costs and those of a few of my friends.