I think it's important and may explain a lot. The fact that they started looking into this is a good sign.

I've always wondered what the slowdown with having chrome or not was and this could explain it.

Loren Brichter is a long-time Mac developer and hardly a "random person"; and his claims were based on anecdata from multiple machines and Twitter reports. Pareidolia is certainly a reasonable null-hypothesis (similar to 99% of computing rain-dances, like repeated defragmentation, or "closing" iOS apps). But assuming the problem isn't completely coincidental or imagined, it would still be good to get to the bottom of it, whether the root problem is Apple's or Google's.

Just now noticed the bug-tracker thread: https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=115840...