Off-topic and a stupid question: why does anything related to Apple attract so much attention on HN? As a newcomer, I assumed HN focused mostly on reverse engineering,retro computing, and deep technical topics.
HN hasn't focused on those topics in a long time, they rarely are on the front page. Skip the top 20 articles and you'll start to see some interesting content instead of all the VC & AI drivel.
Hackaday is a content aggregator site that usually has more content on these topics - https://hackaday.com
Or there are still some good old blogs out there with RSS feeds http://www.righto.com/http://oldvcr.blogspot.com/https://blog.ret2.io/
Small teams are more efficient but (obviously) can't produce at scale. When you scale up, there's enough HR or finance or marketing, or PM, etc. work for full-time specialists. And larger orgs need bureaucracy - if you have a way around that, the world is yours.
Why Mozilla won't let people financially contribute directly to Firefox development and continues to pursue these stupid monetization paths is a mystery.