This defies my Occam's Razor view. You seem to be assuming Google is an extremely well connected organism with vast coherency: each limb knows what the others are doing, they are working together in close fashion, & doing things for ulterior motives.
This is such a horrific & bastardly case - of creating unparalleld rank awfulness hither-to-fore unimaginable - that I am tempted to agree. And I do think there probably was some cross-pollination on this idea (which I personally would characterize as unlike the vast majority of things happening on the Chrome team).
But I still think there's a very necessary "reel it in" counter-response that has to happen here. It was me who characterized this as "only a technical change". Google is trying to shift how the web works & knows it, with this change, and that's clear, and their explainer indeed rather twists words somewhat to make it sound like it's for the user: but it is also imminently clear they seek to shift of the web works in a wide way, and they're not cloaking that behind anything or as simply technical: they're wrong & immoral & awful, but up front about what they're doing, and they're not presenting it subtly.
I linked Yoav Weiss's post with some disdain (for rebuffing), but I think a lot of these rules hold true in most circumstances, and I think even under duress many should be respected to the degree possible. But reciprocally, I've already advocated (in the HN thread) that sometimes I don't think constructive replies are appropriate or possible. When we are working to define the only open accessible shared hyper medium humanity has, there is a higher degree of engagement necessary, which also has to permit explosively deconstructive argumentation sometimes. That was my main critique: that Yoav is sheltering Chrome unjustly from the minefield of conflict he created (or more generously, let be created).