When someone maintains the largest browser in the world, and almost every public website in the entire world relies on maintaining compatibility with that browser, then the standards for reaching out about breaking changes are a lot higher. The amount of time is only one aspect of this, the other is making sure that people actually understand the change is happening.
That is of course, a wildly difficult problem. But while I'm sympathetic to the sheer difficulty of getting people's attention at that scale, I also feel that nobody is forcing the Chrome team to own the entire web. If they're going to be in that position, then they need to act like they're in that position.
At the very least, what internal studies were done over those 2 years to check and see which sites would be broken? How did they miss services like Repl.it during those studies?
My frustration with the Chrome dev team is that they handle feature changes and testing as if they're managing some kind of niche Open Source project, when in reality they are maintaining one of the most important pieces of software in the world. They're not Arch, they're not in a position where they can reasonably dismiss people who get caught by breaking changes because they aren't following the release notes. At the scale of Chrome it becomes their job to make sure website maintainers know about future changes and that nothing breaks.
