I definitely have not had that experience, although use FF for personal, various work, and various educational places.

None of those have required me to install a particular extension..

Of course thats not to deny your experience!

The only time profiles ever come into it, for me, is using web driver, playwright, or whatever.

I guess maybe the usage stats dont support making the profile selector better.

But also, maybe its a thing they would accept a change for?

This is not meant to be an alternative for Chrome's profile switching. It's a different use case entirely.

As you yourself mention, Firefox has actual profile support, which may not be as good as Chrome's, but at least compare like for like.

Myself the profile support is the absolute worst thing about Chrome. I just want to log into some web site, I don't want to fight with the profiles to get things done.

For those few applications where I really would need profiles I will just open a different browser, so I still keep Edge/Chrome/Opera around for that rare situation. I don't need something that complicates my life every single click but it is the whole ideology of the Google Economy that they want you to spend 1% of attention on things that matter to you and 99% on things that don't.

Firefox has a new Chrome-like profiles support as of v149.

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/profile-management