It’s part of the as built configuration of the browser. Just like how Bing is the default for Edge, or Google for Safari.

It’s a design choice that has become a de facto standard, as nobody wants to wade through an onboarding questionnaire for your browser.

This is different, it’s modifying an as-configured configuration and linking it to the update process. It’s bad, as we should be able to trust update processes to be as minimally disruptive as possible.