That is not really popular in the open source world. Who finances the cloud, is it open, who can read or sell your data?
ChromeOS is a product designed to suck people further in to the Google ecosystem. All its limitations, like basically being a web browser with access to the Android Play store, are built around that. The simplicity of not having to worry about anything else is how Google sells that as a benefit of their platform to the masses.
I don't know any of my fellow nerds who want a ChromeOS kind of experience, so why would any of us dedicate our free time to making one?
Interesting perspective. Per the article, this is a method of circumventing the W10 issue coming up.. I would guess that you have family members or friends that might be caught up in that? Even ones that are not nerds?
I really with Mozilla would get in this game. For most apps for most people, hosted PWAs make the most sense. But right now we're either stuck with local native software or only web apps from closed providers.
https://yjs.dev/ seems like a useful building block.