I think Selenium's killer use case is (aside from legacy/inertia) cross-browser and cross-language. In exchange, it comes with a ton of its own baggage, since it's an additional layer in between you and your task, with its own Selenium-specific bugs, behavior limitations and edge cases.

If you don't need cross-browser and Chrome is all you need, then something like a simple Chrome extension and/or Chrome DevTools Protocol cuts out a lot of middle-man baggage and at least you will be wrangling the browser behavior directly, without any extra idiosyncrasies of middle layers.