I haven’t used Chrome’s reading list feature, since I don’t use chrome, but they are competing “read it later” product, so should function vaguely similarly.
Unfortunately I think your impression of Pocket is basically correct, it hasn’t received any meaningful updates since Mozilla bought it, and is very underwhelming product, it’s still baffling for example that Pocket (at least as a browser plugin) uses a different (and generally worse) reading view from the Firefox “reading mode.”
That being said I haven’t found any “read it later” products I’ve actually liked using… (I switched to Wallabag after I quit using Pocket, but have used readability, instapaper, and the reading list feature of “The Old Reader”), so I just quit using the product category entirely, my replacement is “send to device” feature of Firefox so I can find articles on one device and send them to another to either view on a bigger screen, or a mobile screen. (I have a desktop, laptop, tablet and a phone… so this is very useful)