You can't talk about Chrome's market share without mentioning that it was (maybe still is? I don't know) prominently advertised on the google.com homepage.
Everyone who went to search Google saw the ad. It said something like "Try a faster browser"
The fact that Chrome was advertised on the most popular page in the world, and especially that it was the only ad on that page, definitely made a difference in adoption.
The quality of the dev tools has nothing to do with it.
I too remember seeing this ad every time on Google's search page, but it's hard to search for articles mentioning it now, because any search on keywords "google chrome ads" return completely unrelated results.
Also this news piece: https://www.techspot.com/news/79940-how-youtube-employees-ki...
While the article is about Google advertising three different browser in that particular banner, you can see on the screenshot there is another ad, that is just for Google Chrome. That's the ad that was shown all the time on Google Search and Youtube.
Everyone who went to search Google saw the ad. It said something like "Try a faster browser"
The fact that Chrome was advertised on the most popular page in the world, and especially that it was the only ad on that page, definitely made a difference in adoption.
The quality of the dev tools has nothing to do with it.