In general I find the category of folks who -- won't use Firefox, but want to pretend they're not basically just using Google Chrome -- to be very strange indeed.
That said, I agree that you're basically just using chrome.
I happen to use chromium for work because I do development for extensions and it's nice to keep chrome around as my primary test browser and chromium as my daily driver.
Plus I can dig through the source on chromium and recompile locally (admittedly, not super fun) to see if I might suggest additional extension features/apis.
Ok. And achieving those goals can be affected by people being unhappy about their decisions. Google can hire better people for lower salaries, the more they can convince the world that they are a force for good. And governments and the like (e.g the EU) can make rules and enforce them if they see behaviors that go strongly against the best interest of society as a whole. And so on.
I never understood the motivations of people who publicly defend corporations' short sighted decisions on the basis of "they are a business, they are only supposed to consider their bottom line, and aren't supposed to consider their public image in the process." Yes, corporations are allowed to make short sighted decisions, and people on the internet are allowed to complain when they do. (and yeah, I guess people are allowed to defend the corporations, but it simply encourages the companies to do things like this)
Obviously this isn't the worst thing that Google has done, but I support people calling them out on things like this.