This isn't true. Chrome launched with a setting called "Restrict how third party cookies can be used" which was almost the same thing:
> First-party and third-party cookies can be set by the website you're visiting and websites that have items embedded in the website you're visiting. But when you next visit the website, only first-party cookie information is sent to the website. Third-party cookie information isn't sent back to the websites that originally set the third-party cookies.
As far as I can tell, this difference was due to the fact that Chrome (at the time) was a WebKit fork (see https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=12969#... and https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=16658#...). Both the comments I mention are from 2009 (less than a year after Chrome was publicly announced).
I searched through chromium's source to see if I could figure out when this option/feature changed. I didn't find it, but I find plenty of examples of Chromium developers adding functionality and features to make blocking and monitoring third-party cookies easier.
I did find a thread on Hacker News from 2011 (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3034295), by which point Chrome's third party cookie blocking was actually stricter than WebKit/Safari due to changes in Chromium's cookie management. Note that the main argument there isn't that Chrome should expose their strict cookie blocking as a setting (their current behavior), but that Chrome should default to Safari's looser handling (which seems similar to Chrome's original "restrict.." setting). It is worth noting that Firefox did eventually implement the latter solution - but two years later, in 2013 (https://blog.mozilla.org/netpolicy/2013/02/25/firefox-gettin...).
It's possible I have missed something and there is evidence somewhere on the Internet that there was a point where Chromium's handling of third party cookie blocking was significantly different than all other major browsers, but I haven't seen it.