The article ignores Firefox switched the contract to Yahoo as the default search provider from 2014-2017, in complete absence of any requirement to do so. Even if everyone did keep using Google, having Chrome be funded externally through search revenue rather than internally still frees the browser from a lot of over-alignment with other Google desires (e.g. ad blocking, ad APIs, promoting of the Google browser on unrelated Google services).
All that aside, the article doesn't really make much of an argument as to why 3 billion current users shouldn't be worth lots of money to someone wanting to try to monetize (even if the author doesn't see a good monetization opportunity). It, instead, focuses on why the Google integrations Chrome had are what made it popular. One of the biggest differences between Google selling Chrome and any old chromium fork is precisely that the "other" browsers no longer have to try to compete with Google's own browser to get users to monetize.
All that aside, the article doesn't really make much of an argument as to why 3 billion current users shouldn't be worth lots of money to someone wanting to try to monetize (even if the author doesn't see a good monetization opportunity). It, instead, focuses on why the Google integrations Chrome had are what made it popular. One of the biggest differences between Google selling Chrome and any old chromium fork is precisely that the "other" browsers no longer have to try to compete with Google's own browser to get users to monetize.