How much of what you say is due to the “extremely complex” rendering engine and how much to just “simple” app design?
As an extreme example, this is far from true but assume that the next version Chrome was faster on every part of the browser from networking to JavaScript, CSS, etc. Firefox might still be faster for most users on the metric they care about the most because its default tracking protection blocks 90% of the page weight on most sites and so every single one of those people would say it’s faster because that’s what they actually experience.