I would feel that it would be a reasonable if it was my local paper running the story. Arstechnica IS a primarily technical news site—I believe they should have a higher bar—otherwise they are just parroting a report and not providing useful (to me) news.
You can get a pass till July 2025 by creating/setting a registry key that they made for businesses.
Paste this in a .reg file and double click it.
Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00 [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Google\Chrome] "ExtensionManifestV2Availability"=dword:00000002