> but the changes basically align with Apple's browser/content APIs that they introduced in like 2016
This, but Apple's changes are just as bad and should be used as evidence of how this kind of restriction can go wrong, not how it can go right.
Adblocking capabilities on Safari are unarguably weaker than they are on Chrome and Firefox. People will occasionally get upset at me when I say this, but it's really not debatable, there is a reason why uBlock Origin is not on Safari. There is a reason why the best adblocking apps for Safari run as desktop applications and then communicate with an extension.
Safari has a ton of other great privacy features, but adblocking is not one of them. So when we talk about how Manifest V3 is going to harm adblockers, we have good reason to make that claim -- we can look at Safari and see how it played out when Safari did the same thing.
> That's the point - it restricts the ability for extensions to monitor, snoop, and steal content from every website you browse.
Most of the changes in Manifest V3 are actually pretty good, especially changes around the permission models. Active click is great, the optional permissions improvements are good.
I understand why people are phrasing this as "Manifest V3" because you need a name for it, but I hope it's not lost in this conversation that Firefox is also moving forward with its own implementation of Manifest V3 and it has the vast majority of the privacy improvements and almost none of the downsides.
Getting rid of blocking request handlers doesn't really improve privacy. Active tab permissions and optional runtime permissions improve privacy. When people talk about Manifest V3 being bad, what they usually mean is the extra restrictions Google has imposed on top of the privacy stuff; restrictions that do very little if anything to improve privacy (seriously, it is still trivial to spy on users using Chrome's Manifest V3 across all sites) but that cripple adblockers.
It's possible to get the privacy improvements without the downsides.