Unfortunately, iOS is big enough that it has veto power over the entire web platform.

This is so untrue. Google goes ahead and implements stuff regardless of what Apple does or doesn't do.

Any major feature gets worked out by Google, Apple and Mozilla—like Flexbox and Grid.

All of these companies operate on what's in their interest vs. what makes sense for the web.

Folks should be somewhat satisfied with Apple’s Safari/Webkit announcements today:

General
New Features

* Added Safari Web Extensions support for macOS.

* Added Webpage Translation (Beta) for English, Spanish, Simplified Chinese, French, German, Russian, and Brazilian Portuguese. Safari will automatically detect if a translation is available based on your Preferred Languages list.

* Added support for HTTP/3.

* Improved Web Platform Tests pass rate for WebDriver, XHR+Fetch, Service Workers, CSS, and SVG.

Removed Features
* Safari no longer supports Flash.

Performance
New Features

* Supported incremental loading of PDF files.

* Implemented asynchronous scrolling for overflow: scroll, and <iframe> on macOS.

* Improved tab closing performance.

* Improved IndexedDB performance.

* Improved JavaScript cookie access performance.

* Improved for-of performance.

Privacy
New Features
* Added a Privacy Report that shows the trackers that Intelligent Tracking Prevention prevented from accessing identifying information.

* Enabled full third-party cookie blocking, and the Storage Access API in Private Browsing mode.

Authentication and Passwords
New Features

* Added a Web Authentication platform authenticator using Face ID or Touch ID, depending on which capability is present.

* Added support for PIN entry and account selection on external Web Authentication security keys.

* Added notifying users when one of their saved passwords in iCloud Keychain has shown up in a data breach; requesting a password change uses the well-known URL for changing passwords (https://example.com/.well-known/change-password), enabling websites to specify the page to open for updating a password.

* Added support to Security Code AutoFill for domain-bound, one-time codes sent over SMS; in the following 2FA SMS, Safari only offers to fill the code on example.com, and no other domain. Your Example code is 123446. @example.com #123446

JavaScript
New Features
* Added support for the BigInt data type.

* Added support for creating custom instances of EventTarget.

* Added logical assignment operator support.

* Added public class fields support.

Media
New Features
* Added WebP image support.

* Added HDR video playback support.

* Changed to derive <img> aspect ratio from size attributes.

* Support for the Picture-in-Picture API is now available in iOS on iPhone.

CSS
New Features
* Updated image-set() to support all other image functions including image(), -webkit-canvas(), -webkit-cross-fade(), and -webkit--gradient().

Added :is() pseudo-selector support as a synonym for :matches().

* Added :where() pseudo-selector support for specificity adjustment.

* Added support for image-orientation.

Web Inspector
New Features
* Added support for a bootstrap script.

* Added a Sources Tab that combines the Resources tab and Debugger tab.

* Added an HSL color picker with P3 support.

* Added information about Web Animations, CSS animations, and CSS transitions to the Timelines tab.

* Improved VoiceOver support.