This is just my hypothesis, but I suspect that at Chrome‘s engineering team there has been a culture of inaction for the past decade or more. That nothing gets done, no bugs fixed, unless some higher ups at Google sees a business interest in resolving it.

And what has changed now is that the higher ups at Google do indeed see a business interest in fixing bugs and giving the credit to AI to sell us more AI.

Think that’s the case at a few big companies. No doubt Microsoft trying to clean Windows up will give credit to their new ai models.

Bingo. The issue is not lack of knowledge but prioritization at these companies. Microsoft has the ability to fix Windows bugs, they just think it's secondary compared to adding their own new bug ridden features.