Imagine all the semantics you could extract from lists that people curated. The early web used to be human curated content and then Google came along and extracted all the associations they could out of those curated lists (links) and became the juggernaut it is today.

So your theory about Google wanting to run a bookmarking service I think is correct. Human curated links continue to be the only source of semantically relevant content. Everything else is algorithmic extraction of the relevant associations created by humans.

Google already has a bookmarking service at https://www.google.com/bookmarks/

I have stuff saved in there dating from 2007 to 2015. Used to use a Firefox extension to load them in the sidebar.

I was surprised to see that is not the same bookmarks synced in my Chrome Browser. That's the case with https://passwords.google.com/ . Is their a webview of synced Chrome bookmarks (I couldn't find one) and what use case is google.com/bookmarks?

Oh that is trippy, not only does the link from the GP not include my Chrome sync'd bookmarks, all the recent activity on it is places I've starred in Google Maps (!).

Exactly, they have a competing service. They also took down Podcast Addict while keeping their competing podcast app which violated the same terms https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23219427