The drama around the XSLT stuff is ridiculous. It's a dead format that no one uses[1], no one will miss, no one wants to maintain, and that provides significant complexity and attack surface. It's unambiguously the right thing to do to remove it. No one who actually works in the web space disagrees.

Yes, it's a problem that Chrome has too much market share, but XSLT's removal isn't a good demonstration of that.

[1] Yes, I already know about your one European law example that you only found out exists because of this drama.

The case for JPEG XL is much better than that for XSLT. On the other hand, people who program in C will always be a little terrified of XML and everything around it since the parsing code will be complex and vulnerable.

If you really want to improve the simplicity, there are better ways to do so rather than excluding Gopher.

(Also, they could make XSLT (and many other things that are built-in) into an extension instead, therefore making the core system more simpler.)

The company that invented "Web Bluetooth" doesn't have a leg to stand on whining about "immense complexity" in having to maintain old stable features in their browser implementation.

"Steering for more simplicity" would be a political decision. Keeping it is also a political decision.

Removing a feature that is used, while possibly making chrome more "simple", also forces all the users of that feature to react to it, lest their efforts are lost to incompatibility. There is no way this can not be a political decision, given that either way one side will have to cope with the downsides of whatever is (or isn't) done.

PS: I don't know how much the feature is actually used, but my rationale should apply to any X where X is a feature considered to be pruned.