This isn't "weakly related". It's you trying to hijack a topic to discuss your totally unrelated topic. The result is that a substantial proportion of the discussion is now about whether your tangent has any merit or not.
It's not true, here on Android you just want to use a web browser, the one that is deeply linked in your phone, and they profit of their spot to insert dependencies to their service. Stealthily. Looks probably meaningless but just the fact that you don't have an obvious option to disable that in password management of the parameters should tell you something about it.
Also that even if you don't want your browser to sync with Google, to use Google search, your Chrome to use your Google account, there are still connections and data about you sent to Google...
