I don't believe it's accurate to say it's "accessible by any user", the net effect of the policy will be (over a time span of months or years) to limit ad blocking only to the most technically capable users who understand how to do what you describe.

Moreover, extensions that continue to use this behavior are required to adhere to manifest v2, and support for that manifest will likely eventually be deprecated. Chrome blocked the store from serving and updating manifest v1 extensions after a deprecation period.

Google rapidly deprecated version 1, from Chrome 18's release adding version 2 in March 2012 to blocking updating in March 2013, to removal of all extensions that had not updated from the Chrome Web Store in September 2013.

If Manifest v3 follows a similar trajectory, Chrome is on a path to remove uBlock Origin from its web store in 2 years.

One of my favorite things with Firefox is the ability to “edit and resend” requests in the browser devtools. I’m sure there are plugins that do something similar on chrome/chromium. But I use it all the time and my colleagues are always blown away when I show them this.

Is it this?

https://cloud.google.com/chrome-enterprise/browser/download

What platform are you on? I tried Firefox quantum yesterday and could not stand the text rendering. Gmail looks awful. But I don't have a 4k monitor yet...