> Nothing has changed since then.

There's a massive difference. Back then you had a single company that kinda-sorta didn't care about the web. They already had an application platform they were happy with. There wasn't really an incentive for them to evolve it once they had the dominant position. The web was stagnating for years.

Nowadays we actually have multiple players that are very active in the development of the web. The situation is not at all comparable.

> So let's sit back and just watch Google continuously adding more superfluous features into the Web like Web(USB, Bluetooth, NFC, etc) and the web-devs will force you to use Chrome again

Superfluous to you. If developers are using it, then it's obviously filling some need. What do you say to developers who are asking for those features? "Sorry, that's not compatible with my idea of what the web is. Go write a {Windows,Linux,MacOs} application and tell your users to download it".

It always comes back to this. People want progress in the areas they care about, but no progress in other areas.