They actually tried! There was a Chromium project called Blimp for a while which supported browser streaming, but it got shut down after less than a year in development. Had some major dev power behind it too, not sure what happened.
I was head of the Blimp team at Google and could tell you exactly what happened, although it’s probably not something I can discuss too much publicly. Great project, great team, turned out to be very hard and involved making major changes to Chrome to do what we wanted. And unlike Mighty we were not willing to charge users a ton of money to use it. Fast, cheap, high quality: pick two :-)
Project Stream & Stadia happened, iirc.
Very different projects than what Blimp was. Blimp was integrated into Chromium's rendering pipeline itself to stream draw commands directly to the client browser.
True, but I do believe there was a natural evolution. Stadia started as a Chrome project, for example.
That's not going to help with watching YouTube videos though.