It seems likely to me that it is about the 'cost' - not literally monetary cost but one or two engineers periodically have to wrangle libxslt for Chrome and they think it's a pain in the ass and not widely used, and are now responding by saying "What if I didn't have to deal with this any more".

I'm not sure what else it would be about - I don't see why they would especially care about removing XSLT support if cost isn't a factor.

Google is still made up of people, who work a finite amount of hours in a day, and maybe have other things they want to spend their time on then maintaining legacy cruft.

There is this weird idea that wealthy people & corporations arent like the rest of us, and no rules apply to them. And to a certain extent its true that things are different if you have that type of wealth. But at the end of the day, everyone is still human, and the same restrictions still generally apply. At most they are just pushed a little further out.

My comment is not about that at all: it's a response to claim how Google SW engineering team is feeling the heat just like any other free software project, and thus we should be sympathetic to them?

I am sure they've got good reasons they want to do this: them having the same problems as an unstaffed open source project getting vocal user requests is not one of them.