Unsourced comments that cite unsourced comments... this is exactly how FUD spreads. I agree that it's clear that Google wants to reduce the amount of extension

Unsourced comments that cite unsourced comments... this is exactly how FUD spreads. I agree that it's clear that Google wants to reduce the amount of extensions that users opt in to having access to their entire web browsing data. I don't think that's a psychological trick: I think it's very clear that most users don't understand that every single extension they install might have these permissions, and instead just click past the generic permissions dialogue that Google shows. I don't think that that translates to "Google's clearly signalled that they don't want Adblockers to use "read/write data on all websites"". What Google has clearly signaled is that they want users to be able to opt in to using this permission for the extensions that are most important to them, and that they want extensions to gracefully degrade when those permissions are not available. For most users, that's going to be ad blockers: basic features work without full site access, and advanced features are available with more site access. That seems like a good thing to me, not a reason to rip those advanced features out all together.