People may have made different decisions to chose their browser for good reasons, but Google also built a monopoly for very good reasons, too. Users were and are still constantly pushed and incentivized to use Chrome, because of extensive, multi-year PR campaign, digital and outdoor ads, but also technical tricks.
[0] https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/IP_18_...
This shouldn't be an issue if you run your secondary instance with -no-remote -profile="your separate profile".
>Using Chrome for casual browsing was just less of a headache.
That still doesn't answer the original question though. Why choose chrome over firefox, when it has no legacy firefox extensions? Does chrome have those legacy extensions' features built in? Was chrome better than firefox, and the only thing keeping you on was the legacy extensions?