What I don't get is that my browser experience is legitimately better overall, I don't know what was keeping me from switching all these years. Familiarity perhaps.

What about chrome is useless? What makes chrome so useless that a normie would want it to change? In the end both let you browse the internet just fine. from work i use Firefox and at home i had chrome for years. I did not recognise any diffrenses except ram usage and it beeing a Google product. I changed to firefox at home a few months back so it is the same at work and at home. Can't say it feels any snapier or whatever. For a normie Privacy is no reason to change. They don't care. Ram, they probably don't even know what that is. You have to search for new extensions in the mozilla store if the same one you used does not exist there. That is the reason firefox will not dominate Chrome in my opinion. For a normie there is absolutely no reason to change and normies are the majority of people. Some anecdotal story. At work i installed for some colleges Adblockers because the said some of the ads where anoying and after i did in the following months one after another wanted me to deactivate it again because they could not figure out to visit some websites. As i offered them to show them how they could get around it they just denied. "that is to complicated for me." So yeah. Normies do not care and even worse adblock blockers work.

Not to mention that Youtube and Chrome are run by the same company.

In my book, nothing changed because I refuse to run anything closed source on MY computer.