Isn’t that a fork of Firefox that still relies on Firefox development?

Yes. And it seems like a lot of people who shill for it don’t understand that. If every Firefox user switched to LibreWolf then there would be no more Firefox and then no more LibreWolf. Firefox has done some questionable things lately but all of us jumping ship to something like LibreWolf isn’t the answer.

Would it continue to exist if Mozilla shutdown and Firefox was no longer maintained?

Nope.

Loved Oblivion and on PC just wanted no frills gamepad support.

There’s a mod for that. If you don’t like the reskinned UI you can just choose “NorthernUIAway (Vanilla Style)” from the Files tab to get a version with only bugfixes and the added gamepad support.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boycott,_Divestment_and_Sanctions

Microsoft is perhaps the most complicit tech company in Israel’s illegal occupation, apartheid regime and ongoing genocide against 2.3 million Palestinians in Gaza – which is why Microsoft is a now priority BDS target. (source)

576p for life.