It’s neither. There’s no management or promotions or really any incentive to do this other than it’s fun. It’s also not an architectural decision, just how they as a team decide what to work on.
But how does developing a half-baked browser that targets some websites for fun refute that building a browser is impossible? Doesn’t it provide another example that it is impossible, at least for this team?
Well, it takes time to make something big. And, one way to do it is to choose end-to-end functionality. Idk, it doesn’t seem so controversial to me. I’d wait and see before calling it half-baked.
A vertical slice of the properly integrated features needed by some practical use case is certainly more efficient and effective than implementing the whole of a large API (e.g. some fancy recent, unproven and unstable CSS module) "in a vacuum", getting numerous rare cases wrong, and struggling to test the new features.
