What does a browser have to do with Google Play Services? Google Play Services, like the name implies, supplies services to apps and games. Without these services a large majority of apps that rely on them will cease to work on an Android phone without Google Play Services.

As a strange event, I actually upvoted bitmapbrother, we agreed on something! As he says, MicroG is a hack, and there's no reasonable point where someone is going to take stewardship of Android away from Google. (Other than antimonopoly action.)

There's no point in having Android if you can't run Android apps, and most Android apps users want are now dependent on Google's proprietary libraries (Play Services). So why would you want an Android fork if you aren't going to be able to run Android apps? Might as well go with KaiOS at that point.