If it's actually harder to build an open-source browser engine in-house than to finance a bid of over â‚¿250,000 to buy Chrome, that shows how fucked up the state of web development has gotten.
It's probably not harder to develop one in-house, so this just seems driven by the install base.
Either way, devs should really try to follow the rules of older versions of HTML when possible & also stop using JavaScript everywhere. JavaScript seems to be what breaks most webpages on a lot of small independent browsers like Haiku's web+
We also still need a whole new web standard that doesn't use HTML or JavaScript or some of the other old web standards. It should start with a geographically neutral markup language or something. But we don't need to change everything; for example, UTF-8 and the PNG image format both seem good.