It was literally the only app that kernel panic'd any of my Macs in years, and it did it repeatedly on a few bad releases across a number of years.

Given the number of devs at GOOG that presumably used Macs, it was astonishing sloppiness to have been let out the door

2012 there was ultimately an Apple driver issue, but only seemed GOOG was impacted / let the code out the door / couldn't be bothered to patch around in meantime https://www.cnet.com/tech/computing/google-yes-chrome-is-cra...

This was not the first or last Chrome MacOS kernel panic. Personally I recall them happening post 2017 as they were happening when I lived in an apartment I moved into around then. Searching around I see references to more of these types of incidents in later years like 2016 & 2019.

Blind guess: GPU driver bug

as I recall, yes this was it