However...

I didn't measure it, but switching tabs in an Asus C201 Chromebook sure seemed to have a much lower latency than tab switching (or clicking on a different app in a menubar) for any Linux distro I've ever used on any piece of hardware. That includes this Dell XPS laptop running Ubuntu, which is fast and well-supported with firmware.

I speculate without measuring because switching browser tabs on that Chromebook feels uncanny. It's as if there's some ahead-of-time trick that utilizes the camera to guess my impending trackpad click or keystroke. That makes me think I've gotten used to a fairly high floor of latency on my Linux machines.

Add to that the long battery life while browsing in Chrome. Add to that the fact that I open and close that Chromebook at will with the browser in nearly any state, and it never got hot, crashed, or failed to come back up when I reopened it[1].

Those things being true, it makes more sense from a performance standpoint to use Linux from within Chrome than the other way around. That is-- as long as you spend non-trivial time in a browser, it's more efficient to do Linux-Inside-Chrome than Chrome-Running-Inside-Linux. (And I have never found a Linux Firefox config on any piece of hardware that can reliably play videos on Reddit, which makes me think it's not handling video acceleration properly.)

1: The one exception: when I was running a low-latency audio app on that Chromebook which grabbed exclusive control of ALSA.