The most money are paid to the same managers in both cases. The total company expenses in the same period mostly aren't dependent on the nature of the changes implemented. The managers just make their managerial decisions what to set as the goals.
And apparently the board thumbs that up. That's the scope of the problem: "look we make the UI changes" is the "color of the shed" easy to understand illusion of "something" being done.
If there wasn't one manager at Mozilla who said to himself maybe in the pandemic with all the working from home stuff being done. Maybe we should look in our webrtc, video codec stack just is sad. No excuse that's just plain bad management.
Money is fungible, employees are not. Whether others at Mozilla may be tasked with implementing this API or Mozilla (or someone else) contracts Igalia to do it, the employees responsible for and qualified to work on UI are still going to get paid and will still have other work to do.
As far as I know Mozilla is not a foundation for charity towards unemployed developers. So their goal is not finding work for their existing employees, their goal is improving the browser in meaningful ways. They're free to lay off and hire people to do this.
Also honestly any developer worth keeping could figure out the task at hand given sufficient time. So to talk about developers as if there's a developer who can only alter the rendering of tabs and what not is kinda silly.
