No editing or compilation needed. You just needed to disable signature checks (xpinstall.signatures.required) and enable extension experiments (extensions.experiments.enabled) in a developer edition version (or nightly) version of the browser.
I feel like if it was that simple, someone would have written instructions somewhere at the time. I remember having to set xpinstall.signatures.required before FF 57. I am not sure about extensions.expirements.enabled.
Unfortunately, I'm now at a point where I can't be bothered constantly fucking around with my setup and have resigned myself to just accepting whatever Mozilla wants to shove down my throat.
From what I can tell, the community has forked pentadactyl[0] and are using it on Palemoon[1]. I'm guessing if it could still run on Firefox today, they would do that instead of using Palemoon (but I could be wrong). Anyway, I still hate that they killed what made Firefox unique. Trying to beat Chrome at it's own game seems like a pointless battle.