That's a pretty big leap, especially since users can change Chrome's search engine.

There are a couple of reasons they could be making this change highlighted in these threads.

It's the default, and most people who would change it (let's be honest, for privacy reasons) would switch to something like Firefox.

It still feels like you dove into the deep-end of the data collection conspiracy pool before considering other more-likely explanations, like "They have the information now to know that, in general, using color to make the rest of the bar less prominent wasn't sufficient to minimize users feeding data to malicious sites."