It was inevitable to delay the rollout, the adoption of Manifest V3 is way too low among the most popular extensions. Take a look at the various featured categories on the Chrome Web Store, only a small fraction of featured extensions have migrated to Manifest V3. In 3 weeks all of them would have had to be removed from those promotion pages and the Chrome Web Store would have been in ruins.

The deprecation timeline is too aggressive considering that Manifest V3 is still missing important features, so many developers have decided to brace for impact, even if it meant losing the Featured badge for their extensions in January 2023.