people who hate firefox are eating it up. it's so stupid

No, you are the one providing misinformation. The explanation you linked to is completely wrong. "offline" actually means that you are silently and automatically "opted-in", so basically what everybody except Mozilla calls opt-out.

However, this does not change anything to the fact that these "suggestions" were silently enabled in Firefox 92, and that the opt-in dialog box was introduced only in Firefox 93. In addition, this opt-in dialog is not shown if you left your locale as the default "en-US" ("offline" = opt-out).