To be fair (I’m also old enough to remember and even still have screenshots of OG chrome on my desktop) –

Chrome at the time was stupid fast. Like yes we had Firefox, but it was still the era where most people still clicked on the blue “e” and used Internet Explorer.

OG Chrome was [comparatively] lean and dumb-fast. But you know, enshittification and feature creep. I also think that Google has changed as a company as time has passed, mostly due to new leadership (e.g. Sundar Pichai).