I wonder why he made this decision after launching. The consequences and economics of ad-blocking are nothing new or surprising, and I'm sure he knew this while developing the app. Sounds like he was threatened or blackmailed.
One can easily take him at his word that he did not expect to be pinned to #1 on the app sales charts, because that would have been a crazy thing to expect. With that came the kind of attention that he's show drives him crazy in the past, it really is a Flappy Bird analog.
Seems like the type of extension that is in fact very popular, rather than some niche one that only a few thousand out of millions of people would use.