“It’s not arbitrary JS, it needs to be reviewed by the Chrome Web Store team, unless it’s a userscript or we miss it in our review process!”

https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/g/chromium-extensio...

It’s the equivalent of an airport security policy - as I mentioned before, to reduce risk. Which, both in that analogy and here, can indeed be part of a defense-in-depth. But such a policy is not without tradeoffs, and it cannot be evaluated in a vacuum.