> What would be a better approach?

I think Github handled this well by letting you choose between a few canned shortcuts, or disabling the feature altogether [1]. Since I seldom print, I opted to bind the command palette to "CTRL + P"

> Honestly, I think the web platform could use a standard API for defining shortcuts, with browsers providing a UI to manage or disable them. Maybe I'm still over-engineering here.

I'd agree with this sentiment. It's hard, but an obvious (IMO) pain point that has numerous sites reinventing the wheel and needing to introduce some state to save user preferences.

[1]: https://github.com/settings/accessibility

> I was disappointed to hear it may have frustrated a usually silent group.

This group isn't usually silent (far from it), they're just not usually your users.

If you're building a web app a la Notion, Figma, Google Docs, Slack, or anything similar: just ignore the "the web should just be documents that strictly use the platform" complaints. Ensure you build in the required accessibility hooks (since those don't come natively to most custom work), but your users will thank you for accommodating their specific needs better than the platform does.

If you're building a web page that mostly presents information... yeah, maybe listen to the people here.

The main thing you're seeing here is that there's a subset of developers who haven't ever really liked the idea that the web became the primary means of deploying applications.

The "press again to fall back to the browser's key binding" solution many sites use for ^F isn't perfect, and won't work for all scenarios, but it definitely helps.

> Honestly, I think the web platform could use a standard API for defining shortcuts, with browsers providing a UI to manage or disable them. Maybe I'm still over-engineering here.

I think this is really cool and would also allow some interesting features...

- Easier using random input devices. Game engines like Unity with their newest input manager abstracts everything away. Bind inputs not only to standard navigation actions but also app-defined shortcuts.

- Custom UI provided by the browser based on available shortcuts. PCs could get a quick actions bar and phones could have a shortcut drop-down menu exposing functionality.

- If there is an API for enabling/disabling shortcuts the browser can provide context-sensitive shortcut suggestions like some of the profession creation tools like Fusion360 [iirc] where available shortcuts are shown in the status bar.

Maybe you could find shortcuts that aren't used by major browsers. They should be documented somewhere.