Yeah, I'm not even a web dev, but even I can see that Google wants to make the web stack ever more complicated and is has been good at getting what it wants.

I always thought they do that to make it more expensive for anyone to compete with them. E.g., want to introduce a new operating systems for phones? No one will use it unless it has a web browser. So you have to hire a thousand expensive developers to create and maintain the browser (or maybe somehow induce Mozilla to port Firefox to it, which would probably also be expensive).

Sounds very similar to the practice of "Embrace, extend, and extinguish".

They also do it depending on who wins internal turf wars. When Chrome/ChromeOS wins, we get a hundred hardware APIs.

When ads win (they always win) we get FLOC and other bullcrap.

etc.

I don't think there would be demand for extraneous web APIs if the native ones were a good enough replacement. Kinda feels like the fault of OEMs for driving people to the web for good content.

All web APIs are built on the corresponding native APIs - there's no secret bypass mechanism.