You can’t deny its merits. At best you can question their integrity based on bad business-practices in the past. Their CEO being “X” and doing “Y” does not inherently make the software bad.
If you really cared about privacy you’d probably use something like Librewolf, which is not proprietary.
From OP: “at times I have to rely on a Chromium-based browser if a website decides to misbehave on a Firefox-based browser”