You should check out Ladybird browser, it's an impressive piece work, it's definitely no ready for everyday use, but it is proof that a small community can develop and maintain a project as complex and large as a browser.

It is probably the only browser in active development that is not being paid by Google, even Firefox gets most of its income from defaulting the search engine to Google

"Improve performance by removing a function that never did anything" the story of my life

so are we a mixture of experts too?

"Some of you will die, but don't worry I have plenty to spare"

Kotlin without a doubt.

Gives you more flexibility and freedom that most scripting languages. The syntax is clean and concise, the tooling is amazing and can compile to JVM, JS, Native and WASM.