To be completely honest, if you want a healthy 3rd party app ecosystem, the official UI and backend need to be completely separated with a publicly documented API.
Biggest win with Lemmy, and biggest fluff with kbin. And it shows when it comes to 3rd party app ecosystem. People wanted to build apps for kbin….
Ehh, I wouldn’t consider Safari “using chromium” at this point. It has been hard forked for years. Chrome could disappear tomorrow and it wouldn’t affect Safari development.