Earlier quoted context omitted.
Parachutes aren't massless. The parachutes you'd need to land a rocket like this are actually comparable in mass to the extra fuel and landing legs needed for the vertical landing approach. You also can't land on a ship with parachutes. You don't have enough control. You can still land at sea, but then you have to actually land in the water, which means getting seawater on all your rocket hardware. That causes lots o…
If the problem is simply the seawater, you could use a large plastic liner to create a pool of fresh water floating in the sea, and land in that.
That's a lot of complexity to add compared to the current landing which boils down at it's simplest to an inverted pendulum balancing problem, hard but the dynamics are pretty well understood. First parachute landings aren't super accurate without a lot of engineering and controls and would rely on calm or no winds down range wherever you're landing to have any chance of hitting the 'pool'. Second that pool would want to float and to my knowledge no one's made anything like that, so they'd have to invent and build then deploy a huge piece of engineering for every single launch.