Yet we’d absolutely balk at a computer or phone not coming with a browser by default nowadays. I don’t really think that ruling was on the right side of history.
That ruling's only fault was that it didn't go far enough in hammering Microsoft's anticompetitive "moat" practices.
This was all part of the anti-competitive embrace, extend, extinguish strategy that was so common at Microsoft then. They would offer a tool that was "close" to a popular standard (javascript, html), then extend it with their own tooling (jscript, mshtml), and finally they would replace those with a proprietary toolchain (vbscript, activex controls)
That meant the entire market moved to IE and it ate up almost all the market share overnight, even though it was a dumpster fire of a browser compared to the competition