In this case, it's not even his salary: it's his comfort and ease of labor.

It's hard to support a heterogeneous space of user agents running on a heterogeneous set of platforms. Eventually, abstractions break and you end up with a weird bug that only manifests on such-and-such browser in so-and-so configuration.

How much easier life is if you only have to support a few browsers on hardware that checksums to have a known-good configuration...

You think people care more about that than their salary?

It'd vary from person to person, but to a first approximation: Googlers are well-compensated and can be well-compensated at a lot of places. The next best compensation the company can offer them is minimizing drudgework.

Chasing down render errors in the deep interactions between declarative HTML rendering and an esoteric-but-important hardware / software configuration is drudgework.

On the other side, drudgework, in all its dullness and frustration, is still work. If there's less of it, some jobs may be disappear--cushy salary or not.

Some of my best ideas even, came out of clearing drudge.

In the end, does ease of development outweigh all secondary parties affected in this case?

Distribution of power is worth the overhead.

Show me the incentive and I'll show you the outcome