I don't see why they would change their mind today about how the browser works.
Perhaps the best thing they could do is put in a beta browser checkbox and auto build and update it so users can always have the latest version if that's what was wanted.
If they can do all the same things without building the browser themselves then that would be one less thing to do but it could be that they cannot do this for one reason or another. They have so many years now with how it is that I don't see anything changing unless Chromium changed.
Nothing extracted yet.
Can Steam have the option to use your systems Chromium, instead of the built in browser, which is almost always an older version of chromium? For example, include a setting to choose what Steam will link to as regards to browser functionality.
I use Chromium snapshot builds, so the setting would correlate as follows:
Steam Brower:
"chromium-snapshot-bin"
One can choose other options as well like:
"chromium", "chromium-dev", "chromium-beta", and "google-chrome" etc...
The option would allow you to enter any text, so to accommodate to specific bin names and bin links.