The big plus for Chrome Apps for me was that the store made it possible to actually get new users for your apps. For organizations without $ this was useful as a good app would get good visibility once it had a lot of happy users and got good reviews. This was probably a good thing both for users and developers.

Now we instead have to pay Google for ads to get visibility for our PWA. Now we're probably going to turn to Facebook and try to get some traction there.. From one evil walled garden into the next!