Interesting conspiracy theory, but it would imply they were directly bribed by Google because their normal salary depends on the popularity of Firefox so frankly, it makes little sense.

I hate to break it to you, but their normal salary depends directly more on Google.

Google paid Mozilla $600M in 2022 for making Google the default search engine in Firefox.

Mozilla is directly bribed by Google.

I think OP meant that they only receive the allowance because they are popular enough.

mozilla is bribed by google on a regular basis and officially at that :)