The fact that they provided absolutely none of these alternatives isn't a coincidence. Google is a for-profit company with 300+ billion of annual revenue, a giant chunk of which comes from their advertisement services. It's a blatant conflict of interest and there's no good reason to believe that they're acting in good faith here.
To put it in the flatest way, it's not a given that users trust the platform owner more than some extension providers.
In theory that shouldn't be the case, and not trusting a platform that runs natively and has potential acccess to everything we do sounds crazy. But in practice there's only so many platforms, and depending on one's work or environement, not using Chrome isn't even an option.
In that context, extensions are the most direct tools the users have to get back some control.
The change in v3 is that uBlock cannot even ask for more permissions any more
