Linux Mint downloads (briefly) compromised

> They effectively forked Firefox over a trademark issue, yet claim they needed to go systemd because the alternatives require too much effort to maintain.

I'm not sure this works towards your point. Firefox is "forked", in that they compile it themselves, which doesn't let them use the Firefox trademark. They don't need to modify Firefox for this even, it's included in Mozilla upstream. They aren't creating their own web browser.

There claim on systemd is that to maintain an entirely separate init system that they have to solo fix is too much effort. This isn't a matter of putting minor fixups on top of Firefox (the most they do), but maintaining the entire Firefox code base by themselves.

I'm sure Debian has made contradictory decisions in the past, but this isn't an example of one.