I swear I also remember it getting included in installation wizards for unrelated software (on Windows), so people would end up with Chrome/Chromium without even realizing it.
I’ve been out of the windows game for so long I forgot all that malware that was installed by various installer engines and was so relieved when I found portable apps and oldversion.com and ninite. And now I guess there are things like chocolaty that do similar things. Switching to Mac and Linux I don’t really miss it at all