Yes, they have (Safari being the most notorious) but... it doesn't make it right 😉 Neither does competition doing the same stuff. MS started bundling the IE just to get rid of competition (same with other apps, like Skype/Teams…).
I get that they may want to offer "complete environment" that's well integrated and consistent but they don't have to sync all the releases (and neither bundle all the stuff) 🙂
I can understand why they update safari, the same reason why MS updated Internet Explorer and Edge when they changed to that. Security., Sure they do add stuff onto it that I don't want, but at least you have a choice of different browsers. Saying that, a lot of them have stuff I don't use. I am using Brave at the moment, and it has stuff I don't use, but at least I can ignore the bits I don't use.
You are correct about MS and IE, I remember Windows 95 coming out with the now with Internet Explorer on the front.
I read a few years somewhere that MS did not call Windows an operating system any more, it was something like a computer environment or something like that and not an operating system
I don't disagree with you, since Windows 7/8 I started to get fed up with the extras that were bolted on and MS started to make it more difficult to get rid of stuff I did not need. My view was if I wanted the stuff I can install it after, I feel the same way with browsers, more and more is bolted onto browsers, my view if I wanted the extras, then I would install them as extensions.
As I said above, I am using Brave, it has AI, an advert blocker, add password management, I hate using them built into browsers. A reward thing and a wallet for crypto.
I prefer to be able to add them in if i want to. I suppose they take less resources built in than as extensions.
But I don't use any of them.
I used to use a Chromium based browser a few years ago I can't remember the name now, it was great, very little added to it, sadly it was not updated security wise for a while, so I had to drop it .
Before I changed to a Mac, i did think about Linux and I do have it on my PC, on another drive, I have MX linux, but it just don't have the software I need, or the software is not there in quality.
Now, I have a Circut cutting machine, no software on Linux for it, which is a shame. They used to have their software online, so it could work with any platform, but they don't now.
We just have to cope