You could download it and publish it yourself. I have a extension I wrote myself, and while I occasionally see something about having to pay $5 in the extension management panel, it never forces me to do so. If they closed that hole, perhaps it's worth the $5 developer registration fee to some.
When did you publish your extension? I'm an extension developer that makes a mildly popular extension used by a niche group (1-2k MAU) and the Chrome Web Store has tightened their policies over the years. It's possible that you're grandfathered in (and haven't hit any of the extra reporting requirements if you haven't updated your extension recently.)
Extensions these days go through a rigorous review process, and Google regularly shuts down / imposes arbitrary restrictions against extensions due to changing policies.
I understand the importance of strong moderation to protect users from malicious extensions, but I believe Google is using that as an excuse to further lock down their store, increasing barriers to entry and making it harder for developers to build software to extend the most popular browser in the world without Google's blessing.
I hadn't looked at it for a while, so I just did so.
You're right...it won't let me update it now without a lot of justifications on their privacy tab. However, it is still published. The status is "Status: Published - unlisted", so I can't search for it, but I can go direct to the store url for it.
Yeah, that matches up with what I've seen. They've at least been decent enough not to kick people off the store, but I don't think it's possible to just have them sign / publish something unlisted these days without a good deal of policy writing and justifications.
Yet the large actors still publish malicious updates to extensions. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
They have this "private" feature now where you have to list the email addresses of people that are allowed to use the extension. I don't see why that couldn't be coupled with "no review required", so long as the list is relatively short. But, yeah, likely will never happen.
Fortunately for me, I can re-do my extension to use the JS postMessage api which won't require hardly any permissions, and thus, not much to review.
