"Bike-shedding" may be a more fitting term for what you are complaining about. Cargo-culting would be almost the opposite in my mind; e.g. people mindlessly copying a pile of magic CSS they don't understand.

Anyway, I guess I'm just another security grump, but knowing it's a single simple CSS property only makes me feel further justified that "Read and change all your data on the websites you visit" is unacceptable. I don't think that's restricted to security nerds on HN either -- there are probably would-be users who can't find a CSS file on Github and translate it into a user style, who will also not install the extension, if that's what Chome tells them it "requires." I don't know if that's purely Chrome's fault for not having an extension architecture capable of requesting less scary permissions to get this job done, or if the developer could do better too.