Just because you split a large change into a set of minor UX improvements and have different excuses for each individual change, that doesn't make the direction of travel any less damaging.

To be clear, the direction of travel is for Google to abuse their de-facto monopoly on search and browsers to own SSO across the web and track their users completely, at which point they will pretty much own your entire web experience (logins, browser history, maps, news, search, tracking, analytics - all this data will form a huge moat making it hard to compete and hard to resist decisions made by google about the web) - even if you don't use them they'll own the experience of the majority of your customers. This is why these small changes are so pernicious, and why people have reacted badly to them. This is why people reacted so badly to AMP.

This is not an argument over technicalities or quibbles over UX, this is a fundamental question of who owns the web.

Google have built up a lot of trust over the years by keeping the browser independent of their other operations, and making great technical progress with Chrome, but these changes (and others like starting to abuse their search monopoly by privileging certain google results) show that is not going to last - they are now at the monetising phase of their lifecycle, and nothing can stop it - a huge corporation has a momentum of its own.

No - because they are free, ubiquitous, and often installed by default. People choose their browser as they would choose a hat, from the limited selection available.