Google has an incentive to make everything work through the web. Safari has the incentive to gatekeep the app store revenue, which is why PWAs are a joke on iOS.
Google also has bad incentives (Android, ads) but Safari is the IE6 of modern web.
It depends on what you are looking at. Chrome is the IE6 of the modern web as far as it is often the only browser people care about, but it's very much the opposite of IE6 regarding developing new features and moving web tech forward. In order to have a productive conversation about which browser is the new IE6, I think it's important to state what you are measuring
it's the browser you need when your shitty default browser decided to spend their money elsewhere instead of building a proper browser that can compete against the app store lock in
If anyone is building using experimental features that are either flagged or unflagged in Chrome, that's NOT on Chrome. For example, if I built a feature based on Chrome's weird Observables, sure, I could do it... it would work nowhere else. If you're actually seeing this happen, who do you blame in this situation?
IE flat out refused to implement features that were agreed upon by standards bodies. They pushed for VML development and ignored SVG. They ignored CSS3 in favor of their DirectX filters. Chrome does indeed put experimental features out there AFTER they support the standards. Firefox also has agreed to a set of web standards and is simply behind on implementation.
Having lived(as a developer) through IE4 - IE9, I reserve that title of "the new IE" for the worst offenders.
The web gives users a lot of control using extensions. That's why companies don't like it. Google tries to fight it by not supporting extensions in its mobile browser. Apple is more egregious, preventing people from doing many things using the web platform entirely, with no escape hatch.
Much better but only slightly more popular. Partly because the Play Store ecosystem treats wrapping PWAs as a first class use case and you don't even have to source APKs from the official store anyways - so there's not much to gain by delivering via "true" PWA. Apple goes more the route of the stick than carrot.
Google also has bad incentives (Android, ads) but Safari is the IE6 of modern web.