I don't think there was ever any expectation that the Firefox/Iceweasel trademark dispute would "kill" either organization. About the most serious it got, IIRC, was some heated discussions on the Debian bug tracker; there were never any legal threats involved, and the situation was ultimately resolved to everyone's satisfaction by the name change.
This is very relevant to anyone that cares about open source.
Companies being able to host any OSS without the threat of a trademark dispute is vital to the software industry.