It's a tiny thing to override this CSS property and makes mobile browsing of desktop sites so more convenient -- there's is no difference between Chrome on a mobile device and Chrome on desktops in terms of speed and usability of sites. In contrast, using the web browser on iOS is a real pain considering that Apple forbids to install any other rendering engine.
And if you don't like the text reflow just turn it off, it's optional on Android. Finally, it's a much better solution for visually impaired people since you can scale the fonts quickly as big as you want and the text just reflows. This even works on mobile sites since you can override zoom locks. There are so many benefits Apple just ignores with their "design decision" (mainly driven by commercial interests in favorite of the app store).