Personal anecdote here, I have a Chrome extension with a few thousand users that has never been subject to this wait. That seems to be because I have a narrowl

Personal anecdote here, I have a Chrome extension with a few thousand users that has never been subject to this wait. That seems to be because I have a narrowly defined scope for my extension and therefore the permissions I request are relatively innocuous. That exact article you linked was posted to HN a few months back. I remember someone dug into it and found the permissions it requested. The full list was rather broad and as a result the extension could have basically hijacked the entire browsing experience. A malicious extension with those permissions would have been a potential goldmine. I think it is perfectly reasonable for Google to want to review extensions like that.