By your argument, once anything makes it in, then it can't be removed. Billions of people are going to use the web every day and it won't stop. Even the most obscure feature will end up being used by 0.1% of users. Can you name a feature that's supported by all browsers that's not being used by anyone?
Yes. That is exactly how web standards work historically. If something will break 0.1% of the web it isn't done unless there are really really strong reasons to do it anyway. I personally watched lots of things get bounced due to their impact on a very small % of all websites.
This is part of why web standards processes need to be very conservative about what's added to the web, and part of why a small vocal contingent of web people are angry that Google keeps adding all sorts of weird stuff to the platform. Useful weird stuff, but regardless.
3. It seems there are plenty of examples of features being removed above that threshold NPAPI/SPDY/WebSQL/etc.
4. Resources are finite. It’s not a simple matter of who would be impacted. It’s also opportunity cost and people who could be helped as resources are applied to other efforts.
As a general rule of thumb, 0.1% of PageVisits (1 in 1000) is large, while 0.001% is considered small but non-trivial. Anything below about 0.00001% (1 in 10 million) is generally considered trivial. There are around 771 billion web pages viewed in Chrome every month (not counting other Chromium-based browsers). So seriously breaking even 0.0001% still results in someone being frustrated every 3 seconds, and so not to be taken lightly!
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Read the full doc. They even give examples when they couldn't remove a feature impacting just 0.0000008% of web views.
