[eins1234]

Being able to fork is great in theory, until you realize how few players in the world can afford to not stay in sync with the mainline branch and bankroll their own ongoing development (even those who can afford it have thrown in the towel and fell in line, e.g. Microsoft's abandonment of Edge's old engine).

> As a full stack developer I've battled so many times with weird implementations or unexpected behaviors across browsers that knowing that I can assume that the user will be on chromium is just piece of mind.

If webkit/blink is the only game in town, web standards will become standards only in name. The weird implementations and unexpected behaviors you see on webkit/blink will become the de-facto standards.

Why would webkit/blink developers (or the companies who fund them) bother with the inconvenience of the process of standardization and involve multiple stakeholders and collect feedback from users when they can just ship new web features or break existing ones when it's in their best interest?

You can already see this playing out with webkit and Apple's neutering of web capabilities on iOS in the interest of keeping it from becoming a threat to its walled garden.

With all that said, we're already on the collision course to this world, given the prevailing sentiment in the web community is to build only for webkit/blink and leave other engines as an afterthought due to their low market share, resulting in a vicious self-reinforcing cycle. Like the OP I'm not sure if there's much that can be done about it at this point.