I mean, wouldn't the ChromeOS way be to just... use Chrome itself without also running server-side JS underneath it? Arguably this is the opposite -- Google goes in hard on the idea of expanding the Web's capabilities, after all, where a lot of the Apple camp has historically preferred keeping certain system-level stuff like hardware access away from browsers. Shipping Node underneath seems to skew more toward the latter, even if it's going to vary by team whether it's a philosophical choice or just a pragmatic one.

I agree that I'd rather just have a system WebView for things like this, but putting aside that the landscape for those is effectively just Blink/V8 or WebKit/JavaScriptCore at this point, it's still perfectly valid to just want a single engine that behaves consistently across environments -- particularly given Safari's history of being slow to adopt Web standards even when they don't fall into the whole argument of capability.

Even Tauri, which currently relies on system WebViews, has started collaborating with the Servo team[0], at which point you're cycling right back to shipping a browser stack for writing desktop apps in JavaScript. (And for that part, I'll take the further development of alternative browser engines as a net gain tbh. See also: Wolvic.)

[0] https://twitter.com/TauriApps/status/1505618001126731781