"Government policy" yeah right. Chrome implements stuff, and Moz has to follow suit; then it gets prescribed in WHATWG's spec. OTOH, stuff introduced by Moz that Chrome doesn't implement gets removed from the spec. Such as much needed new elements for basic declarative UIs (menu, menuitem) to fight over-reliance on JavaScript and CSS hacks, introduced by FF but boycotted by Chrome. As was part of the WHATWG snapshot on which W3C HTML 5.1 was based, and removed in W3C HTML 5.2. There's no evidence Hixie analyzed "what browsers were doing". There is, however, evidence that Hixie just made up new elements as he saw fit [1].

[1]: https://www.webdesignerdepot.com/2013/the-harsh-truth-about-...