Yup, it's not great. Still seems easier to just turn them off with the new tab settings panel than recompile the whole browser, but I guess everyone has their own preferences.
There are better browsers than Firefox if you care about privacy. Both Brave and Tor have better results in this comparison that was shared here recently: https://privacytests.org/, same with this tool from the EFF https://coveryourtracks.eff.org/ it gives better results for Brave than Firefox (even with blockers installed on my Firefox). Mozilla themselves give the same score in their very limited comparsion: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/browsers/compare/
Multi-account containers are really the only killer feature in Firefox for me, they're super convenient for my work, but that's about the only thing it has left going for it.
The Librewolf project appears to be the best of all! I will try it.
edit: Statement below is incorrect, Brave is a Chromium fork.
I do note that Brave, Tor, and Librewolf are forks of Firefox. This in my opinion is an additional reason to support Firefox. Everyone else appears to be plundering naive users' browser telemetry.
Be prepared for stuff to break. I recently tried it and DRM content sometimes doesn't work no matter what you enable (my recent example is Udemy, which the devs claim happens in other FF forks). Also, by default it wipes history/sessions when you close it, which can be a rude surprise.
The https://privacytests.org/ test is... bullshit, as it only test the DEFAULT browser settings when you initially install it without changing anything.
And, even worse, they don't even mention this on their website.
Bravo Mozilla!