From what I can gather, they don’t intend on adding multi device capabilities for technical reasons. A big requirement for me is to be able to use both mobile and desktop without losing the history.

Well, Opera is also based on Chromium.

They plan a release for 2028. It’s going to be a while before it can be used for everyday browsing.

Jump ship to what? Not like there’s s lot of choices out there. You could always try LibreWolf.

Not really. Helix is closer to Kakoune which is based on the modal editing of Vim but reimagined a bit.

There’s a pretty simple reason. It’s that developers don’t have to spend the time to package for every single distro. I know I wouldn’t, I’d just focus on packaging for the distro that I use and flatpak. Having flatpak also means that some less known distros start with a big amount of apps available from the get go with flatpak.