Part of the answer is that people now are forgetting just how much goodwill Google had with the tech folks around the time Google came out with Chrome. It was open source! You could easily run it without Google! It was a titan squaring up against Internet Explorer, that did horrible things like not follow web standards or invent its own. And it was really really good.

It took a handful of years for tech folks to see Google (and Chrome) the way they do now.

Here is the most voted HN post from the time of Chrome's release: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=291946