OK, this sounds bad. But... Devil's advocacy here: are there any real-world examples of actual sites whose event behavior was actually broken by this change in Chrome 56? It happened a few months back, and I don't remember anyone complaining.

I mean... it broke the author's app. Probably a few others somewhere. But it seems not to have broken anything significant.

I guess I fail to see the concern here. It's an edge case of an existing API that apparently "no one used". Google found a way to get a benefit from exploiting a "change" in this "unused" API, presumably tested to make sure it was unused, and then went ahead and pushed the change over an 8 month period.

Is that really so awful? As someone who lived through the early '00's and IE, this seems pretty benign to my eyes.