Its a token gesture. Ladybird is not a serious disruption.

How could you be so confident about such a thing?

Are you implying it's going to fail in its goal as a competing browser, or that the competition is somehow irrelevant in a world that's forced to be slave to Google/Apple?

I'm implying that Ladybird will never grow to the size where it will have any influence on the internet. So this donation is a token gesture to making things better and will be unlikely to change anything.

I dont think Ladybird will ever surpass Firefox and to have any impact it would need to be at least as popular as firefox.

If the mere existence of Ladybird is enough to keep Mozilla's behavior in check, then that alone is worth it. It need not have major adoption to be useful in this sense.

Likely related on getting influece in order to enforce the gatekeeping standards, unfortunately.

Even if you end up being right, which is not outside of the realm of possibility, it's still huge to get a boost on breaking the browser duopoly while ironing out longstanding issues with web standards.