You're concentrating on the time period when IE was the only game in town and ignoring the 10 or so years post Firefox/Chrome (until basically they switched to

You're concentrating on the time period when IE was the only game in town and ignoring the 10 or so years post Firefox/Chrome (until basically they switched to Chromium) when it was behind the times and was a tremendous drain on web development. Any attempt to say that otherwise is just wildly incorrect.