For me personally, it's because I've been burned too many times by blog posts announcing that "feature X is here!", when in reality, it's only here in Chrome or behind a feature flag, or the exciting parts haven't been implemented yet. Even this blog post falls into the same trap. There isn't good cross-browser support for view transitions or anchor positioning, and yet they're listed as here now.
View transitions are the perfect candidate progressive enhancement. If the browser supports it, then the user will get the rich animations. If it doesn’t, then they get what they currently have.
And once other browsers starts supporting it, the experience will automatically work in those browsers too without you needing to touch a single line of code :)
> View transitions are the perfect candidate progressive enhancement.
Quite the opposite. The alternative to "no view transitions" isn't "clunky hard-refresh page-by-page experience," it's single-page view transitions orchestrated by JavaScript (instead of by Chrome). View transitions require you to fundamentally change the architecture of not just a page, but your entire website/app.