The state of the debate is unsatisfactory. Google employees such as Justin Schuh are aggressively defending the move on tech/security principles and denying commercial motivations, while uBlock Origin dev (Raymond Hill) says the change will cripple or kill uBO on Chrome and evil motives are its raison d'être . It's good that mainstream media articles raise the awareness of the issue, but a good technical discussion b…
The existing webRequest API lets extensions run arbitrary third-party code over all the requests you make, and Chrome won't process the request until it's done. That inevitably means that a badly written extension can hurt page loading performance, and a malicious extension can get a lot of sensitive data about you. Whatever Google's true motivation is, there's no way to solve those problems without limiting the powe…
The security concern is difficult to solve (more fine-grained permissions might help), but also seems a bit disingenuous since extensions can also inject code into the HTML of all sites and already syphon off a lot of data if they want to. Sure, it's a sharp knife, but some tough issues require sharp tools.