This sounds like RFCs, W3C standards and most others. Pretty much all standards lag.

There's almost always **at least** one implementation that has been tested, they figure out what works well in practice and then write it up and submit it to the standards body.

I think that's generally fine. It becomes a problem when there's a near monopoly. When Google makes Chrome do something non-standard, convince web developers to quickly depend on it, and then users get mad when their other browsers don't work. Then others browsers implement the new thing, and at that point the standards body might as well accept it since it's already a defacto standard.

Maybe that's the case here, but I maintain that the problem is not that we have a free market of ideas where people can implement whatever they want, but that a single client has gotten enough sway to make everyone else feel compelled to immediately follow suit.