Long running systems were still using pre-standardisation libraries for string up to 2012 however, so you may well have come across such projects.

C++0x was a thing, with varying levels of support from all major compilers, for years before C++11 was finally ratified.

In the context of my original comment though, no matter how dated the code base, I think it unlikely that Chrome was using any variant of std::string that had an implicit conversion operator for const char* such that string could be passed as a parameter to a function taking const char* without needing to call c_str().