I'm not low-level enough to confirm or deny the specific claims in the article.
I will say that my experience with regards to CPU performance "leaks" and Chrome seeming to always be running in the background even when I didn't want it to, as well as Chrome starting up on system startup when there didn't seem to be any references to it anywhere I'd expect to cause that, are consistent with the article.
I saw a lot of "low-level integration" with my system going on, a lot more than I understood, ever wanted or asked for, and there was no way I knew of to turn it off. It was like IE on Windows all over again.
I was also able to solve the issues by removing Chrome from my systems.
I sometimes install it temporarily to do Web testing and remove it shortly afterwards, but I think I'll do that in a VM from now on.
Chrome can/does definitely run in the background if you have chrome Remote Desktop enabled. It wouldn’t surprise me if they had a daemon always running in case you want to enable Remote Desktop.
I just tested it. Setting up Chrome Remote Desktop requires installing a separate package which Chrome downloads for you. When it's enabled, there are indeed two always-running processes located under /Library/PrivilegedHelperTools/ChromeRemoteDesktopHost.app, which are apparently launched thanks to /Library/LaunchAgents/org.chromium.chromoting.plist. But those weren't running before I set up Remote Desktop; I imagine they were installed as part of the package and didn't exist before.
If I disable Remote Desktop again… well, it doesn't actually delete the LaunchAgents plist or ChromeRemoteDesktopHost.app. That's rude. But it does make the processes stop running.
(To be totally clear, Chrome's updater does run in the background, though not all the time.)
I have a standard install of chrome on big sur, as well as brave, and a bunch of electron apps. When I start up my mac none of these are running, there is no process with chrome or chromium in the name, and nothing in the process list that I can link back to chrome. When I launch some of the electron apps, chrome_crashpad_handler launches, which I assume is some kind of default electron behavior. When I close those apps, all chrome-related processes disappear from my process list. There is nothing untoward about chrome I can tell, nor is my system seeing any kind of recognizable slowdown, with or without chrome running. I also have chrome on very low-end macs, a 2009 mini with 8 GB ram and a 2014 air with 4 GB RAM, both running catalina. It runs fine on both, without seeming to cause particular performance issues. I just went through a reinstall of the 2009, and there was no performance difference before and after installing chrome.
I'm not saying yours or other people's bad experiences with chrome are not real, but I do wonder how it's possible that there are such very different experiences out there with what is ostensibly the same product. Maybe it's not just one cause: bad extensions, broken profiles, old installs with broken updaters (I had a broken microsoft updater causing havoc for a while), badly configured enterprise deployments, etc...
I'm not low-level enough to confirm or deny the specific claims in the article.
I will say that my experience with regards to CPU performance "leaks" and Chrome seeming to always be running in the background even when I didn't want it to, as well as Chrome starting up on system startup when there didn't seem to be any references to it anywhere I'd expect to cause that, are consistent with the article.
I saw a lot of "low-level integration" with my system going on, a lot more than I understood, ever wanted or asked for, and there was no way I knew of to turn it off. It was like IE on Windows all over again.
I was also able to solve the issues by removing Chrome from my systems.
I sometimes install it temporarily to do Web testing and remove it shortly afterwards, but I think I'll do that in a VM from now on.