it definitely dictates it when you’re talking about things like APIs exposed etc.

I gave examples of the opposite in an earlier comment. Though it's unclear what level of APIs you refer to here, specially given that you said "same deal with webkit" (which, again, is not under google). You might as well apply the same deal to gecko too.

incorrect. very few browsers will [...]

This is a contradiction. If few browsers will do it, then my statement that it can happen is correct, and I included that just as one among a list of many other possible choices, including entirely killing their project and contributing to the death of Chromium's ecosystem, making a scene about it and further sway public opinion towards alternatives... in fact, another option could be to have their team move over to contribute to one of the existing Webkit alternatives, or fork one of those with whichever cosmetic changes their userbase likes. The point was that the final say on what those projects will do is a decision those projects can make, not Google.