I don’t see this resulting in 20 different web browsers or kernels or OSes that are anywhere near as good as the ones we have today. Making even just one is a shocking investment of resources and a massive ongoing maintenance responsibility. Many, many human lifetimes have gone into building something like Chrome. Wishing that this herculean effort was forced to be duplicated 19 times over just so that you could have alternatives to choose feels kinda perverse.

Talking about the complexity of modern software might be a tangent. However.

I think that if time and effort were limited by this fragmentation, we would find that we're able to do just fine with browsers that have fewer hours of effort put into them. The current range of second-tier browsers have a ton of strange and interesting ideas about them, but because the web standards they have to support are so complex they simply can't support much of the modern web. I imagine that those standards would be written much more conservatively if the writers knew that it would be impractical for anyone to implement them.

> Wishing that this herculean effort was forced to be duplicated 19 times over just so that you could have alternatives to choose feels kinda perverse.

There is absolutely no reason for you to get personal.

Having too many equally dominant options for computing platforms might sound good at first but in practice it means effectively no software is portable and the whole industry becomes inefficient as a whole with people doing redundant work most of the time.