Internet explorer was actually a decent browser in its peak. The whole "dragging things down" happened later on because people kept on using really old versions of IE (mostly the one bundled with Windows XP).

The main problem with Internet Explorer in its hay day was that they did not play nice with other browser vendors and implemented features outside of the standard. Those features were then relied upon by website developers, causing many websites to only work on Internet Explorer. After all - most people were using internet explorer, why cater to anyone else?

Chrome is not quite in the same position as Internet Explorer was back then, but it's getting frighteningly close. There are several websites that only work on Chrome, and despite me not using Chrome as my primary browser I do have Chrome installed because for some websites I simply need Chrome. This is obviously very dangerous to the freedom of the internet.

Funnily enough Apple forcing iOS users to use Safari actually helps here. Because so many people use iOS and they need to use Safari, website developers need to cater to at least one non-Chrome web browser. That in turn makes it more likely they will also cater to others (e.g. Firefox) rather than relying on Chrome-only features.

I seen recently change logs like "reverting from webp to jpeg to support iOS users", so it seems to me that the lowest common denominator now is Safari.

No doubt it is, I'm just explaining why comparing Chrome to Internet Explorer makes a lot of sense. Having a single browser used by the vast majority of people is a bad situation to be in. Especially when that browser is developed by a company like Google.