The lack of the jump scare cookie banner on the XSLT version is certainly an improvement, but I otherwise agree. Google search burying XSLT driven pages isn't a surprise given their stance.
I think Google has a general philosophy of the web that promotes crawlable HTML over other formats. I noticed recently that traditional job aggregators like XML job feeds, yet Google promotes JobSchema as an incompatible standard. So less that Chromium directs pagerank, and more that Google's genreral view of the web is HTML over XML. I hope JobSchema fails because it is harder to aggregate, unless you already index web pages at scale.
Although I don't have firm evidence, haven't worked at Google, and you likely know company dynamics better than I.
