Microsoft's cheating had no influence on the fact that Netscape's engineering (and/or its management) messed up bad.

I completely disagree with this. The unfair competitive advantage that MS created was directly causal in Netscape acting out of desperation. Desperate companies do desperate things. Often really stupid desperate things.

If they had continued with the dominant market share and comfortable revenue stream, they would have made slow comfortable decisions. Instead they made rash, desperate decisions and imploded.

Microsoft had no valid justification to take that much market share that quickly (Netscape was much better for the first couple of versions). They could only do it because they could leverage their OS.

If it had been a fair playing field, the outcome might have been very different.