Chromium dev tools and Lighthouse audits sound like a Chrome features marketing campaign, once you proceed beyond basic optimizations and bug fixes, like
use our new image formats, stop shipping old JavaScript to new browsers, provide a source map, use web font preload but only if you use it exactly matching the best case scenario, rewrite your manifest file which used to work just fine etc.

actively encourage people to exclude up to 5% of global website audience?!

"This means that 95% of global web traffic comes from browsers that support the most widely used JavaScript language features from the past 10 years"

https://web.dev/publish-modern-java...