I think you’re discounting that everything Chrome does these days is designed to become a web standard, unlike IE which was trying to have browser-only features for lock-in.

Chrome does seem to be somewhat hasty, which can have a similar effect in practice. But it might seem different if you actually want a feature and don’t want to wait years for it?

I don’t think Web Audio is as bad as you say. There is the ScriptProcessorNode which is getting deprecated in favor of audio worklets because having JavaScript processing audio on the foreground thread is a bad idea. But other than that, it seems nice for making simple audio processing graphs, and the infrastructure for putting JavaScript in the background took a while to work out.