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Because it's super complicated and a thousand moving parts are involved. You have to parse HTML, draw everything correctly, do JavaScript, Canvases, WASM, Websockets, HTTP 1.0, 1.1, 2.0, SPDY, support 10 different image formats, 5 audio, 5 video formats, allow videoconferencing, write a plug-in system. Handle Bookmarks, History, File downloads, uploads, .... ..... ......
The standards alone are thousands of pages. You gotta read them all, understand them and program everything. Which takes years for a team of developers. And you also want it secure or your users get in all sorts of trouble. A browser is the number 1 way to get malware on your computer. And all these experts take a decent salary. Multiply that (hourly) wage with multiple people and several years and you'll end up with an expensive product.
Don't forget the fully fledged remote desktop thats built in, WebVR (which is being replaced with Web XR), Web Bluetooth, Web USB (aka Web Serial), the API's for notifications, ambient light sensors, an entire transactional database (indexed DB), the language translation API, the Gamepad API (videogame controllers), hardware passkeys (yubikey), speech to text, text-to-speech, webGL, webGPU, webworkers, service workers, an entire suite of cryptography tools, GPS location, battery, vibration, FileSystem API, picture-in-picture API, WebRTC, WebSensors, etc.
And then, on top of all that, building a miniture OS-kernel so that tasks can be sandboxed scheduled/executed and prevent 1 tab from crashing everything or hogging resources.