But the probability of life arising is an unknown. Intuitively I too feel it probably isn't that small, but it wouldn't be the first time intuition about the universe is wrong. How do you _know_ the odds of life arising aren't 1/10^30?
Disclaimer: I'm the one who made the change in [1] so I'm biased but...
IMHO the argument on the blog mischaracterizes the situation - Chrome didn't break these properties but changed how they're interpreted under pinch-zoom. This was done precisely to keep backwards compatibility (on desktop browsers): at the time, the vast majority of pages assumed pinch-zoom can't happen on desktop (something that was becoming more common). The status quo meant zooming in on a desktop page would cause it to "swim" as various "fixed" elements shifted around, JS drop-down menus appeared in the wrong place, etc. This happened virtually everywhere one looked: facebook, twitter, apple.com, etc.
The blog basically argues for "make pages fix themselves" which, even if major sites do, is unrealistic in the long tail.
> They might pull the “proposal” only to just do it again later
It's not nefarious, this often happens in response to feedback and real world experience to try and minimize disruption. In this case, developers convincingly argued that there should be an API to better react to pinch-zoom before making the change.
The extension uses a new URL fragment addition that Chrome has shipped: https://github.com/WICG/scroll-to-text-fragment so these links will work on any Chrome/Chromium-based browser. (in non-Chromium browsers without the extension the link will load but the fragment wont be recognized)
The hope is that this is useful and adopted by other browser engines and links like this would eventually be interoperable.
The big difference is that the original intended text is encoded in the URL. An element-id fragment is better than just a URL but will often be less granular than the exact text being linked (e.g. a heading).
If you're looking to link a citation to a statement, having the text is far more useful since the person following the link doesn't have to now find the statement in a potentially large and broad section. Also, if the page has since changed and the text no longer substantiates the cited claim, that'll be immediately apparent.