Everyone knew IE was going away. Chrome is not, from what we can see, and is not going away any time soon. If anything, Chrome/Chromium-based browsers are eating other browsers' lunch, just look at the numbers. I absolutely hate Chrome doing their own non-standard things, but you live in a special bubble.
No. That's an exciting fictional world in which you live, and was not the case. Even in the last years preceding Google's chrome release and massive marketing push, when Firefox and Safari were taking "significant" marketshare, it was assumed IE would be forever, and IE-only sites were still common (and the norm in "enterprise" software).
There is literally no difference between a developer that says everyone uses/should use chrome, and a developer a decade ago saying the same thing about IE.