FWIW I once tried and failed to compile Chrome. My machine didn't have enough RAM to compile chrome at the time. Even though it was able to fully compile any other software I threw at it.

Is that special to the Chrome codebase, or inherent to the fact that a web browser is now basically an operating system by itself?

I think parent's point was that Chrome is not open-source, chromium is.

But also this. Compiling Chromium from source is a nontrivial task, even for a senior dev, and requires an extremely powerful system.

Yeah, you need a big machine. I provide Chromium builds for AWS Lambda, compiling on a large EC2 instance.

Just like the US tax code is well documented?