Exactly this. You had to be really vigilant during install.

Average joe: next next next done.

Don't ever fantasize about average users back then doing research if there would be a better web browser and then going ahead to download and install chrome on their own.

"What is a web browser?"

I remember third party IE toolbars being bundled (and that practice pre-dated Chrome, IIRC). But I don't remember the full Chrome browser being bundled (I do remember the Google Toolbar). I was a Chrome user from basically the day it was released because I found it to be superior so I may have been blind to the practice since I was already using Chrome.

The Google Toolbar adware installer component itself (the "Google Updater" or something like that) that you remember in installers eventually silently upgraded to a Chrome installer. Almost every installer that ever installed Google Toolbar was automatically a Chrome auto-installer, "thanks" to software as a service. If you didn't uncheck hidden "Google Toolbar" checkboxes, that would also auto-install Chrome. (That added to how hard it felt to keep Chrome from ever being installed on a machine, because sometimes you'd overlook the "Google Toolbar" in older installers as yet another trojan horse for Chrome.)

Eventually the Google Toolbar itself would just auto-upgrade to Chrome as well.

Anecdotally, my father liked the Google toolbar for giving a separate search box in IE, but disliked Chrome and was confused when Chrome auto-installed and the Google Toolbar partly became a big ad for "congrats, you can use Chrome now", and that was one of his reasons to (finally) switch to Firefox for good (he used both IE and Firefox for a long time prior).