I hear this and I also hear the lack of experience with enterprise (let alone commercial) software development.
Five lines of code still requires one dev, one PM, and one manager. It still requires security reviews, audits, and so on. There are no free lines of code in a commercial code base.
There is a substantial difference between developing state of the art hot R&D technology and maintaining one js hook into C codebase, especially considering its only this one webRequest.onBeforeRequest binding we are interested in thats being degrade/blocked/deleted and not the underlying codebase https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44544266