But somebody else mentioned that widevine on chrome os and chrome are different. So I wouldn't have expected their servers to accept those 1080p requests for chrome's version.
Edit: says so on Github:
ChromeOS apparently has a different DRM implementation than chrome, even though both use Widevine.The fix from the Netflix side would be to find a suitable alternative to user agent sniffing for h/w accel and swap that in to this code path.
What I am saying is: If they are blocking everything but chrome os intentionally, it would have been easier.
According to widevine docs [1] chrome on desktops does not support security level 1. They could have and probably did block access to 1080p content on level 3.
Which leads me to believe that netflix relaxed security to allow 1080p on level 3. As you said the next step would be to replace the user agent detection client side.
[1] https://storage.googleapis.com/wvdocs/Widevine_DRM_Architecture_Overview.pdf