It's not accurate to blame this on upper management. Someone, somewhere, pressed a button - either a human reviewer (yes, takedowns are often issued by a human)

It's not accurate to blame this on upper management. Someone, somewhere, pressed a button - either a human reviewer (yes, takedowns are often issued by a human) or someone who set up whatever botched ML algorithm decided to nuke this extension. It sounds to me like this was definitely humans. Humans also handle disputes, and Google's staff that handle them are borderline incompetent and don't respect developers or end-users. You can say "upper management sets the policies" but I think that's giving people with some degree of control a pass. A highly-compensated SWE definitely has the option to not just go with the flow.