No, it can't. Chrome is deliberately designed to be entirely non-modular. The codebase itself is somewhat modularized in the sense that related functionality is grouped into different directories and build targets, but the Chrome team have no interest in allowing it to be cut down to just the needed functionality.

The main reason for this is politics. The Chrome team is ideologically wedded to the idea that everything should be a web app running on Chrome. They see desktop and mobile apps as the "enemy" to be wiped out by making the web do more and more stuff, until Chrome is the universal OS. Classical ChromeOS is the pinnacle of this vision - a computer that only runs a web browser and nothing else.

Chrome's architecture reflects this, um, purity of vision. It is not reusable in any way and the Chrome team do not care to make that easier. Projects that make it embeddable or reusable are all third party forks that have to maintain expensive patch sets: CEF, Electron, etc, all pay high maintenance costs because they have to extensively patch the Chrome codebase to make it usable in non-Chrome apps. The patches are often not accepted upstream.

This problem also affects V8. Several projects that were originally using V8 are trying to migrate to JavaScriptCore or other JS engines because V8 doesn't have a stable API and building it is extremely painful. It's a subsystem of Chrome, so you have to build Chrome to get V8.

This is a pity. There's a ton of great code in the Chrome codebase, and it can be built in a modular way (with millions of small DLLs). It's slower to start up when you do that due to the dynamic linking overhead, but it does work. Unfortunately for as long as the Chrome guys see native apps as a bug to be fixed and not a reality to be embraced, we will continue to have dozens of apps on our laptops which statically link an Xbox 360 gamepad controller.

There are a few possible solutions for this.

One is to not write Electron apps. Java went through a modularization process in version 9 and since then you can bundle much smaller subsets of the platform with your app. I guess other platforms have something similar. Obviously, native apps also don't have this issue both because the platform comes with the hardware you buy and because they tend to be more modular to begin with. But, people like writing Electron apps because it gives you the benefits of web development without many of the downsides (like the ultra-aggressive sandboxing). The nature of the web platform is that it always lags what the hardware can actually do by many years due to the huge costs of sandboxing everything so thoroughly, whereas Electron apps can just call into native modules and do whatever they need, but you can still use your existing HTML/JS skills.

Another would be for an alternative to Electron to arise. There are experiments in using system WebViews for this. That doesn't make the web platform more modular, but at least means it's a single install is being reused. You could also imagine a fork of the web platform designed for modularity, for example, in which renderer features are compiled out if you don't need them or even bringing back renderer plugins.

Another is to just tackle the issue from an entirely different angle, for example, by opportunistically reusing and merging Electron files on disk and in memory between different apps. If you ship your Electron app to Windows users using Conveyor [1] (or in the Windows Store using MSIX) then this actually happens. Windows will reuse disk blocks during the install rather than download them, and if two apps are using the same build of Electron the files will be hard-linked together so only one copy will be in memory at once at runtime.

But fundamentally the issue here is one of philosophy. Chrome wants to rule the world and has a budget to match, yet their approach to platform design just does not scale. For as long as that is the case there will be lots of complaining about bloat.

[1] https://hydraulic.dev/ (disclosure: my company)