He says “powered by or funded by Google”. Firefox depends on Google financially, most of the income of Mozilla comes from Google paying for being the default search engine.
They try to diversify their income (Firefox VPN, email alias service, etc.), but anything they try gets a huge backlash from the community, and still small compared to the the money from google.
I found they have a newsletter, that sounds like an acceptable middle ground, not good, not terrible.
RSS is not even enabled on the Newz page on the website.
Alea iacta est - The die is cast - said Iulius Caeser after he crossed the Rubicon river. Usually Roman dice were cubes.
Unrelated to this event, roughly 2000 years later a guy named Ernő Rubik invented his cube
Your example with the buses is wrong. There is a standard called GTFS and public transport companies publish their fleet status and timetable according to this standard, Google just reads and displays this data. Nowadays you should see the same data in the official apps and gmaps. There are even foss solutions displaying the same thing like transportr.app
You can browse this data worldwide on https://www.transit.land