It's a single 5$ registration fee per account. Nothing huge.

Once you paid the fee, you can publish as many extensions as you want.

https://developer.chrome.com/docs/webstore/register/

This is probably a very light anti-spam measure?

It is[1].

[1]: https://blog.chromium.org/2010/08/security-improvements-and-...

Relatively, they're correct. Compared to other app stores like Apple where the fee is $100/year, which personally I'd consider huge. To get on Steam, the fee is a one-time $100 with the ability to get it back after $1000 in sales. It's even low compared to Google's other marketplace, the Play Store, which has a $25 one-time fee.

While $5 can be a lot for certain people, relative to the market it doesn't deserve the title of being "huge".

firefox now requires developers to 'sign' their extension with mozilla, and has disabled the ability to side load extensions manually for more than just temporary use, unless you are using some special developer version of firefox. chromium still allows users to side load their extension. it's ironic that google would allow more freedom to the user than mozilla.

I rarely use Chrome. About once a month to make invoices (Firefox PDF output isn't correct), or rarely for some site that's not working in Firefox or Safari, just Chrome.

Even with that low usage I had to side load an extension recently to add some functionality. Thank goodness it's still possible.

Seems like a good way to prevent a lot of bad actors spamming. Google has a lot of problems with people automating free signups for computing and distribution resources... if you give someone any amount of free computing power, abusers will come.

Maybe that's good to reduce spam submissions.

Oof you have to pay Google to publish extensions (and they still can't manage the spam?) That's some brain damage.