"Development slows" is not necessarily a bad thing. E.g. quite a lot of people would love development to slow wrt Manifest v3. It would also mean that web standards are less of a moving target for browsers playing catch-up (like Firefox).
People can also pay for browsers. The only reason why this isn't feasible today is because it's hard to compete with the top-of-the-line stuff that megacorps offer for free - which they do precisely so they can maintain de facto control over web standards (or force the lack thereof in areas where this is advantageous). Lest we forget, many early web browsers were paid products (not just NN, but also Opera, for example), and Microsoft's original sin as a monopoly was offering IE for free, against which NN couldn't compete. But if Google is forced to ditch Chrome, and Microsoft is forced to ditch Edge...
People can also pay for browsers. The only reason why this isn't feasible today is because it's hard to compete with the top-of-the-line stuff that megacorps offer for free - which they do precisely so they can maintain de facto control over web standards (or force the lack thereof in areas where this is advantageous). Lest we forget, many early web browsers were paid products (not just NN, but also Opera, for example), and Microsoft's original sin as a monopoly was offering IE for free, against which NN couldn't compete. But if Google is forced to ditch Chrome, and Microsoft is forced to ditch Edge...