Also I feel like the biggest gripe with generating (long) PDFs from HTML are things such as page numbering, orphans and widows, semantically correct word-wrapping, page margins, etc...
Chrome does a decent job but is nowhere close to what LaTeX can do.
https://github.com/RelaxedJS/ReLaXed/wiki/ReLaXed-vs-other-s...
It is open to contributions, so any thoughts welcome. In a nutshell, all your points are valid. Chrome is one of the best browsers, but still behind LaTeX in some aspects. But which will evolve faster in the future ?
Are you comparing Chrome and LaTeX? Chrome is certainly evolving faster overall, but features related to PDF printing have not changed much, or any at all.
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/Paged_Media
a blog about this issue: http://www.pagedmedia.org