The point was made that, in one course, they're already learning JS/HTML/CSS and the full MEAN stack. Adding on the requirement that it work in each browser is just too much, especially when you consider how you'd want to grade such a thing.

FeatureA works in Chrome/FF but looks weird in Safari and is outright broken in IE. 7.346/10?

It's not "make it work in each browser", and it's not "just too much". If you spend an additional couple minutes per assignment checking functionality in major browsers (ignoring IE), you're set.

For your FeatureA, I'd ignore IE (that's a whole college course in itself), but I'd grade that 9.8/10. -0.2 cause it looks weird in Safari.

As a real world analyst, I'd love a job where you just sit there and pay me to come up with "insights/deliverables" and not have to worry about implementation details.

Indeed, in my experience, the thought that this is how it's done/what analysts should do is a chief complaint about academic-esque analysts, because they can't actually implement anything or their solution is completely unworkable for real scale/tech environment/software stack.

But I would happily take a job where I can be paid to live in my ivory tower if you know a place that views that as the deliverable of analysis :p

Indeed, I think the comparison of someone delivering a webpage that doesn't run on other browsers is quite an apt analogy...

That's not entirely true, what about when you bring someone in and say "here's my mysql server that I haven't upgraded in years, analyze the data in it"