Chrome has gone off doing their own standards to some extent, but you're forgetting what it was like when Internet Explorer dominated. You basically couldn't use the web without IE because they broke so many standards and implemented them in closed source. Then there was ActiveX on top, straight up Windows binaries in web. And besides there being a dominant engine, only one browser could use that engine. Trading that for Chrome dominance was at least a step up.

I use Firefox right now. Occasionally I need to open a site in Chrome instead, but it's rare.

Chrome and v8 was just stupidly faster than any other browser and JS stack at the time when I first adoped it. It was a lot buggier in many other ways and many sites just didn't work quite right at the time, but the tradeoff on performance in the early days was very much worth it.

People forget that Sundar Pichai's entire claim to success at Google was injecting the Google Toolbar into the Adobe Reader installer which would hijack your search and browsing data on IE, and the launch of Chrome, which was then also injected into the Adobe Reader installer, occurred because Google was concerned IE might block or limit their toolbar.

People absolutely did like Google at the time, but the majority of its growth is actually shoveling hijackers into other software installs just like BonzaiBuddy.

I recall Chrome being a superior browser in the early days, prompting many to switch and evangelizing it.

Lots of supposedly technically advanced users switched to Chrome en masse and promoted it on every occasion they could, because it was so much faster, simpler, safer, etc etc. Don't excuse useful idiots from their share of the blame. People warned about dangers of Chrome's growing domination for about as long as I can remember, back to at least 2012, only to be dismissed as paranoid.