Everyone losing their minds over this like Firefox doesn't exist.

Stop using Chrome.

The reason this is even a big problem is because everyone piled on Google's browser despite all the obvious reasons that wasn't gonna be a good idea on the long term.

I never understood why anybody thought a company – whose principal business is advertising and data mining – wouldn't eventually rug pull everyone like this with their browser as soon as it hit critical mass for market share.

Because there weren’t any great options at the time. Firefox has gotten better, but at that time Chrome was just super fast and lightweight in comparison to all the competitors.