I guess "doesn't suck" is the highest praise that it can be given. Perhaps that's all the higher the author aspires towards in their life. Reading that they spent their career in public education and noting that the national average math scores don't even reach the proficient level, I guess "doesn't suck" is all they shoot for.
NIH it uses the Chromium web engine. Still it is better than Chrome. My son did a college report on Chrome verses Edge and did benchmarks and Edge was faster. His hypothesis was that Chrome would be faster which was proven false.
I mean, it's true. If you don't care about privacy, and are fine with using Bing for search, Edge is actually a pretty pleasant experience. The problem is that it isn't great for privacy and tries to force Bing with all manner of dark patterns.