Only thing I wanna nitpick... it's not _quite_ back to 2001. In 2001, we had IE6 that plagued the web and held it back. It was a different situation for two specific reasons, one of which is commonly discussed and one of which isn't.
1) Chromium is open source, Trident (IE6) was not. It's much more difficult to be stagnant for this reason alone. Anyone not liking the direction Google steers the project in can fork it and do their own version (e.g, the de-Googled Chromium builds out there). Trident (IE6) never had this, it was the definition of vendor lock-in.
2) It's easy to forget how different the environment was back then. The desktop still reigned king, and mobile devices weren't even really close to what we think of them as now. Companies were different as a result; Microsoft outright didn't give a shit about the web, and thus you saw IE6 languish. It was good enough for them so they didn't have to care. Google, on the other hand... literally wants to own the web, for better or for worse. It's in their best interests to keep Chromium healthy.
I really should just do this as a blog post...