Mozilla is independent.

Firefox fund the development of their browsers mainly through search revenue––they require this revenue to survive

One company continuing to exist entirely at the whim of their direct competitor seems like the definition of dependency to me. Mozilla’s current business model requires them to function as a de facto subsidiary of Google.

that or Inkscape are the only real answers I’d have if you forced me to name one, but I’d have a hard time recommending a vector graphics editor to a regular person who just wants to edit text formatting in a PDF without messing it up.

I’m always surprised that, for as widely used as PDFs are, there doesn’t seem to be any real alternative to Acrobat for editing existing PDFs.