This is not a bug. Nor is it news. It's an intentional design decision from years ago. The alternative is requiring users to manually enter a "vault" passphrase

This is not a bug. Nor is it news. It's an intentional design decision from years ago. The alternative is requiring users to manually enter a "vault" passphrase every time they start chrome, to unlock both the password vault and the cookie store (remember, your cookies are effectively passwords too). This has been tried, and the overwhelming consensus from users is "DO NOT WANT". So encrypting to the data at rest, and unlocking it with user login is generally accepted as a reasonable compromise.