You can go to the Blink + V8 engine without using Google Chrome; in fact that’s exactly what you should be doing as Google’s browser has way more spyware built into it.
The thing that killed it for me was the lack of PWA support
I hear ya. I’m still butthurt about Fx killing SSB (site-specific browser) before it even had a chance. They had the feature locked behind a flag & then removed it due to low usage. It seems a lot of folks hadn’t even heard of it til the news was out about it being removed. It would have been great to use since you could run something akin to firefox --ssb https://url (I forget exactly the command, & you’d want to write it to cover Gecko forks), but it means you could ship some apps with just exec. Since the process was pooled with the main browser instance too, it wasn’t as taxing on resources as Electron.