I will give my benefit of doubt to the maintainers as well (as the author notes). Chromium is an open-source project - so there is a way for an interested browser vendor to make a change to this behaviour and enable support for their browser. So far there doesn't seem to be any indication of a malicious intent. If such requests were made and shot down consistently, _that_ would be concerning.
Chromium is a Google project, that they happen to open source.
That they put in a preference for their own interests wouldn't be 'malicious intent' from their part, it would be 'why they built it in the first place'.
Parts of the codebase are maintained by Intel, Nvidia, Microsoft and others. There have been times when Google engineers have had changes rejected by people from those companies.
You might be thinking of Android, which has a far less open governance...
The market has decided that it does not care about a lighter footprint browser engine - it just wants autocomplete, to remember all your passwords, and users don't want to have to think too much. This much is clear. If there was a browser with the light footprint of Safari with the nice flexibility of Chrome without the permanent 5gb of memory usage, you'd have a winner. I'd even pay Sublime Text prices for that (once, optional upgrades).
