It is: builds being painful enough that it's near impossible for smaller distro's to maintain a Chromium package, is community-hostile in itself.

A true community project is flexible w/ respect to dependencies, builds in a way that's doable by anyone who puts in some effort, and sends bugfixes in dependencies upstream so that -normally speaking- project can build against common (versions of) system libraries.

Doing the exact opposite screams vendor lock-in disguised as an open source effort. Of course no surprise this coming from Google (also notice similarities with the Android project).

It's relevant because Chrome market dominance still has a very strong influence on websites working (tested?) only with Chrome. Add to that Google's NIH syndrome and its "move fast" mantra at the cost of interoperability with the wider Linux community and then both things are relevant.