Is Chrome the New IE? (2023)

No not even close by every single possible measure.

I was there, I suffered through it, Google would have to make TONS of hostile moves for that fact to change.

I have no interest in the arguments of a closed source subscription service that wants me to switch to the bundled browser of the wealthiest company on earth's most popular consumer OS, lecturing me about using the 4th wealthiest company on earth's browser that I freely installed.

The most important one from an anti-trust perspective, every device I've ever had Chrome on I've had to seek out and install/make default Chrome, that includes my mobile devices which used the manufactures browser by default.

If I want to use chromium I can, Safari has been VERY late in implementing certain industry spec standards (SSE's, web sockets, IndexedDB API, animations, relative color syntax, container queries, a bunch of <video> stuff, flexbox, the list goes on and on.)

Safari was late until a couple of years ago when they started implementing new features more aggressively. Now it's always Firefox. Just check how long it took them to add support for the :has() selector and RegEx Lookbehind. We're years into "manifest v3" and background workers are nowhere to be found.

Funnily enough it was Firefox who figured out a workable algorithm for :has IIRC

Absolutely not.

Firefox has mindbogglingly bad performance with :has() even if their superficial tests tell you otherwise. I experienced minute-long lockups just because I used :has() on a large element like body. Chrome and Safari had no issues with those selectors.