> We don't have multiple different type of gasoline, or home heating oil

We do?

Actually, this is a great analogy. We have grades of gasoline because there is a trade-off between anti-knocking and cost. Monoculturing the grade approximates the diversity of requirements worse than honing in on a few points on the curve. As with browser engines, there is a limit to this diversity since each additional grade imposes novel fixed costs in production, distribution and combustion. But I’d be surprised if something as varied as browser engines optimally solves for a single solution.

There would still be competition among high level features for the browsers which I feel is more important for users. Reduced competiton on things like performance I don't think will be so bad as either someone will optimized it benefiting everyone, or things that are not hyper optimized will become insignificant as computers get more powerful.

> We don't have multiple different type of gasoline

We have diesel and gasoline at least.

However the key difference ethere is somewhat different: We have independent supply lines, starting at different oil fields, going through different refineries, into different distribution networks, which ensures that there is some competition (even oligopolic is better than plain monopoly) and supply chain attacks on one vendor don't havoc the complete supply chain.

For a practical example: Countries were able to massively reduce the dependance on Russian gas and oil recently.

If Google however decides to havoc chromium development all dependants have trouble.

>I wish Brave or some of the other Chromium Skins would become Firefox based.

This hurts because Firefox should have been that embedded framework powering browsers like Brave and electron apps. But that would have required them to invest in R&D to match performance but also to make their rendering engine easily embeddable (with a corresponding investment in documentation and outreach).

Brave actually started out as a Gecko-based project - they were using some Gecko-based Electron equivalent, if memory serves. It was such a PITA to work with that they switched to a Chromium base.

>Blink is objectively bad in the first place

Do you mind explaining this statement?

There's always money in ~~the banana stand~~. Er, webkit.