takeahike Many I think would contribute to such a project, potentially making it financially possible.
It’s a complex issue. For example, Vivaldi is a small team. I think most Chromium-based browser projects are relatively small teams, but I’m not sure. A lot of the Vivaldi team has their roots with the old Opera browser (before it became a Chromium based browser). They’ve mentioned many times that the old Opera Presto engine had over a hundred employees, just for the engine alone. I don’t think dedicating that amount of resources to what would be a niche product would be profitable.
I also know that the Vivaldi developers have said that they spend a lot of time just adding back in the various hooks that they use that the Vivaldi browser needs every time there is a new Chromium version. So even the small changes are a lot of work.
Even if a group of browser developers had the resources and desire to maintain a fork, then it runs into other problems. With every new update to Chromium, the fork would need to backport security fixes and ideally add the new Chromium features. At some point I would be a bunch of conflicts. It might be one of those things that might be possible to maintain for a while, but eventually not. And, as Chromium and the fork diverge, it’s essentially going to be another browser engine. And that’s going to lead to website compatility issues. A lot of time website compatiblity issues aren’t even a technical issue, it’s just that some websites are designed to not deliver content to browsers that aren’t recognized.