The fact that they provided absolutely none of these alternatives isn't a coincidence. Google is a for-profit company with 300+ billion of annual revenue, a giant chunk of which comes from their advertisement services. It's a blatant conflict of interest and there's no good reason to believe that they're acting in good faith here.
For all intents and purposes, that's basically equivalent to deleting uBlock Origin for 99.9% of the 29M users it currently has.
> only allowed it for a small set of manually-audited extensions like uBlock Origin
That would most definitely lead to accusation of favoritism. That would be just as annoying of a pipeline to maintain.
> The fact that they provided absolutely none of these alternatives isn't a coincidence
They delayed the release 3 times, it was first announced in 2020. The whole time, they were taking feedback and making changes. They made a ton of changes that made MV3 adblockers possible.
No.
> Even if they don't, you, the (power)user should be able to manually turn on whatever you want, should you so desire.
It's not as simple as that. As long as it is possible for extensions to have no-holds-barred access to your browser then they'll make that a condition of use, and unsophisticated users (approximately everyone) will just say "eh ok".
Browser extensions are a particularly dangerous case because they auto-update by default. It is very common for popular extensions to get sold to bad actors who then update them to inject ads into everything you view, or worse.
If you make it impossible for extensions to do that, then they can no longer make it a condition of installation.
Putting security in scare quotes doesn’t make the actual risk go away. This is a blatant anti ad block move, but you aren’t making reasonable arguments either.
