It is all a gimmick but as long as people are switching to a chromium based browser and not Firefox I'm happy. With that said, I don't know how anyone would trust a small team to build them a secure and safe browser. Chrome is so battle tested at this point and Google puts a lot of resources in maintaining it, they stand to lose a lot more given their scale.
I agree; it also makes using Chromium for all sorts of automation a lot easier. I found these because I wanted to automate generating PDFs of a report page.
I didn't know that's where the feature flags lived. I imagine documenting them is tough because it'll heavily depend on the version since they graduate to become standard features over time.
I remember reading or seeing this post about how SQLite can really scale and supports a really high amount of transactions per second. I don't know if it supports distrubuted loads that well, which might be the reason why it's use didn't pick up server side.