"The new plan is to take the alternate approach of presenting a confirmation dialog when deleting built-in search engines. This should serve nearly as well to protect against accidental deletions while still allowing users to intentionally remove built-in search engines"
“Yep, I think Tommy, Angela, and I all came to the same conclusion that we'd like the pre-populated search engines list to be indestructible, or maybe even immutable. A front-end UI restriction sounds like a step in the right direction.”
Also of interest, it seems the one who reported the bug with “strong preference” is the one who implemented the change.
Notice how almost none of these updates gives the user more control over their computer, network utilization, or browser.
I’m still regularly trying to help Chrome users in my life understand the difference between being signed into Chrome and signed into Google.