Indeed, in 2016 requiring IE can be forgiven as a symptom of Microsoft captivity and/or being behind the times, while requiring Chrome is a proud proclamation of some mixture of not caring about standards, not caring about UX, not caring about users, not caring about proper web design (in order to avoid proprietary features), and being an ignorant and arrogant Google fanboy.

It's strange too, because if you are building a production-ready (i.e., not a proof-of-concept demo using bleeding edge technologies supported in only one browser) website or webapplication, the bare minimum level of browser support that grants you a very modern set of features you can depend on is to only support up-to-date evergreen browsers. That means Chrome/Chromium, Edge, and Firefox.

I can get dropping Edge if you are an individual developer and simply don't have any Windows machines around (testing websites from a VM really sucks), but going Chrome-only pushes us back to the monopoly position that harmed our field so much in the first place.

Actively moving towards a webkit-monoculture ultimately harms our profession.