Being a web developer was not fun; and the web was absolutely being held back. Chrome did a lot of things right: per-origin sandboxing, properly implementing web standards, V8, developer tools, and back then Chromium was super close to Chrome.

Do I think Chrome is a net-negative for the web over the past ~3-5 years? Yes, especially with manifest v3, “privacy sandbox”, and them basically forcing through web APIs because they have the dominant marketshare.

But early Chrome was a technologically impressive and user-friendly browser that really did make the web massively better.

I remember happily putting Firefox and Chrome mini-banners (what are they called? Those little rectangular images) on my website, for free, because I recommended it.

Chrome's introduction, albeit through smoother, lighter browser experience at the time, pushed other browsers to standardize to google.

In one way it's bad to have a homogenous approach to all things web based, but in another way it did make the internet a better experience overall.