What I am not sure about is whether this is an effective push by google or more simply it is the amount of web programmers/authors going for the low hanging fru

What I am not sure about is whether this is an effective push by google or more simply it is the amount of web programmers/authors going for the low hanging fruit (or with the "flow"), they simply test the site in chrome (or Edge)[1] and call it a day. This is a pet-peeve of mine in general, web developers (and developers in general) should also test their software on low power/low memory machines with a slowish connection to verify that what they wrote is actually usable by people that do not have the latest-latest of everything. [1] possibly the very latest release only, on the very latest OS version, on a very powerful machine, with a stupidly fast connection to the internet (that most other people won't have)