Would be quite different if they patched it and broke important extensions, possibly facing serieous outcry and bad publicity.

I agree that would change things but I can't picture an open-source extension with millions of users pivoting to rely on something that's clearly a bug.

At that point it's a feature, not a bug.

Having millions of users on your side is great ammunition.

Important extensions like, dunno, uBlock Origin?

Yeah, surely if chrome broke important extensions people will get mad and switch.

That's what they already did.

Not really, this sort of fame farming is what makes candidates stand out in infosec interviews. A bug in Google systems is good for his future career.

The post says they had another bug with a large bounty in the same year, so it doesn't seem very useful for CV padding either