the problem with using a plugin for something like this is that as soon as the plugin becomes popular enough, a third party purchases it from the original developer and adds a bunch of telemetry. stylish is a recent high-profile example, but it happens to small, benign-looking extensions even more often.

the problem has gotten so bad that i no longer use the plugin "store". i only install plugins that are open source, and only by building the source myself... meaning i miss out on automatic updates (but at least i know my plugin isn't spyware!).

it sucks.

It is also difficult to see which extensions have been granted what permissions. Right now I’m sticking with known extensions but maybe I should be compiling my own

There used to be plugins for almost anything. Then most of the powerful ones were kneecapped because of some bad actors. The new system is a joke.

I don't know, I kind of like it. I was writing a simple webextension within hours. Good tutorials etc.

New api functions are coming all the time as well. Its not yet as powerful as the old system but is there any reason to believe it will never be?

Literally yes, it will never be that powerful, and that's intentional. The old way was so powerful, able to do anything, because well, it basically just ran your addon in the core browser's execution context. Way too scary to give add-ons that much power.

However I genuinely do want stuff that isn't yet implemented. For example I want add-ons to get access to Firefox's copy of the Public Suffix List, which is what you usually wanted when your add-on actually just treats TLDs as special. I just this evening sent a PR to PassFF, a popular password manager to do something crude as a stop gap while we wait to access the PSL via Web Extensions.