That worked because IE was a pile of burning trash.
Chrome & co are not.
It’s a different world.
Chrome and Firefox are privacy nightmares and everyone knows it.
That has zero to do with how well they "just work" for the average user, which wasn't the case with IE6/7 back in the day.
Lots of stuff "back in the day" simply required IE and you just had to have it. And for people who needed stuff to "just work", IE generally did because it was the most popular browser in the world. I don't recall Firefox or Netscape ever being the majority browser.