That's not really true though, myself or anyone else could fork Gemini right now and add a lot of "unwanted" features to it. The only reason nobody will follow through on that is because everyone who cares about those features is already using the web and has no reason to add them to Gemini. In that sense Gemini has skipped past the "embrace and extend" and moved itself right to "extinguish", which actually seems to be its central design.
Not just that. Whoever uses Gemini already is likely trying to escape those unwanted features, so they have no incentive to use something that adds them in.