Pripyat is not inhabited in a normal way. There are no children or families and there won’t be. Simply because children eat dirt and dirt is radioactive. Saying it is inhabited like you did implies there is normal life happening. It never will be again.
I have met Steve at Ms several times, and he always seemed like a nice and genuinely motivated person. He seemed to like product challenges and even took on hard tasks like leading the core team of Windows 8.1 App enablement ( think of getting Facebook to create a Windows native app). I’d believe him that Mozilla treated him wrongly or asked unfair things of him, otherwise he wouldn’t need to take these steps.