* Setting custom startup flags to chrome
* accessing a hidden dev-specific page and turning on acceleration features that were deemed unsupported or experimental.
This page looks related though I don't remember if these exact instructions worked for me or not: https://www.linuxuprising.com/2021/01/how-to-enable-hardware.... I had to do a bunch of research before I arrived at a working solution.
After I enabled these features, my desktop started encountering a problem where I would have to kill and restart the display manager once, and thereafter the display manager would occasionally hang and I'd have to restart it.
It was manageable with a few days research and technical skill, but it's not the kind of thing you would expect most people to put up with.
Another thing to note, Chrome's software renderer didn't seem to play well with my skylake? integrated graphics. Not only was it slow, but buggy with screen tearing and other visual artifacts. So I had to get acceleration working so my browser would both render properly and be reasonably responsive and performant.
One specific Linux issue I ran into repeatedly is that Chrome and Chromium by default refuse to trust Linux graphics drivers and instead do software rendering. It turns out, software rendering makes your browser really slow and makes it burn tons of battery when not plugged in. I eventually figured out how to enable most acceleration for Chrome. However, there were several electron apps like Zoom that didn't expose any option to enable hardware acceleration. The zoom desktop app was completely unusable for me on Linux. Instead, I used the browser app exclusively.
Slack was similarly unusable without hardware acceleration but to its credit exposed an option to enable it.