Don’t browsers need a target to work their implementations towards, even if it’s a snapshot that is essentially arbitrary?
In practice, implementations all followed the latest specs draft anyway, not the latest snapshots. The problem with following a snapshot is that you end up following something that is known to be wrong. That’s obviously not the way to get interoperability! This has in fact been a real problem at the W3C, where mistakes are found and fixed in the editors’ drafts of specifications, but implementors who aren’t fully engaged in the process go and implement obsolete snapshots instead, including those bugs, without realising the problems, and resulting in differences between the browsers.