If history has taught us anything it's that forcing users to agree to allow access in order to get what they want doesn't stop them from doing it. Especially when programs apps and extensions are required to ask for broad access to accomplish even the smallest tasks that the warnings become meaningless noise. If I want ads blocked and I trust a company enough to install their blocker I'm not going to uninstall it just because it needs access to the content I want it to check over for the presence of ads. No matter how many warnings I get or how scary they sound I still want ads blocked.
https://developer.chrome.com/extensions/manifestVersion#mani...
Deprecated in March 2012, stopped accepting updates to Manifest v1 extensions in March 2013, and existing extensions stopped working in January 2014.
EDIT: Google's blog post talks a lot about removing the "blocking version of webRequest", so perhaps the monitoring one still exists? But their goal would be to make these into separate permissions - the very popular blocking extensions can work blindly, while monitoring extensions can still function? It's not very explicit about it, but that's how I'm reading it https://blog.chromium.org/2018/10/trustworthy-chrome-extensi...
The point I was making is that chrome.webRequest is still around (as I understand it - if I'm wrong, please correct, because that's my whole point!), it's just for observation only now. Plugins can still request that permission... which means plugins can capture just as much data as before this change.
That doesn't seem like a good trade off, given the two complaints you listed.