Take the IP Protection "feature". They hide your IP address from individual sites while hoovering up all of the user's data into their own servers, to use for their own ends.

Privacy hasn't been enhanced, if anything it's been weakened by giving one company a log of everything done through the browser. So, it's a fucking lie

Well, with that proxying feature, I mostly meant that they're not doing it for the privacy, but rather for those other benefits.
Much like with 8.8.8.8 for DNS and AMP for the server-side, this feature locks down the client-side, ensuring that internet traffic goes over their infrastructure.

Yes, user privacy is short-term somewhat improved, because their competitors can't track you quite as easily anymore, but if they truly cared about improving privacy/security, there would be so many much lower hanging fruits they could pick, like end-to-end-encryption for Chrome Sync by default. They don't pick those, because it would impact their own ability to invade user privacy.