> just because people happen to have bought into its ecosystem.

I don't think that's a fair take. Plenty of us are developing webapps for safari/chrome/firefox, are barely ever consider browser differences. I think a lot of credit for this also goes to a wealth of high quality css/js frameworks that abstract what minor differences exist these days, rather than apple.

It's worth also considering what specifically was bad about the IE dominance era in order to understand how it maps to our current situation. IMO it wasn't just that IE was bad (of course it was), but that its usage share was _dominant_. That doesn't come close to reflecting the current state of mobile browser usage: https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share/mobile/world...

Worldwide Safari is a minority player. In the US (probably the best case), safari holds a slight majority at 55%, and the other 45% are likely almost entirely blink. At one point (early NS6/pre-phoenix), IE had something like 95% usage, and closer to 99% for corporate usage.