I don't know why you ever thought it was for developers. Clearly not having coreutils makes it a non-starter ad a development machine.

ChromeOS was always about being a thin-client. A better kiosk OS, if you will.

With that being said, I use Chrome OS for development. I have a DigitalOcean server that I SSH into using the excellent Secure Shell app, do all of my development there using tmux/vim and test in a browser tab. If you already like this workflow (some don't, I understand), then Chrome OS works very well for web development.