Most extensions want to read every site you visit. Almost none of them need to.

A cookie editor does not need access to every website. It needs access to the site you opened it on, and that is a much smaller ask. Chrome has supported asking for that, at the moment you need it, for years now. Most cookie editors still request all sites at install time anyway, because one broad request is less work than handling the case where permission gets granted later.

So my cookie editor asks per site, when you open it. My video speed controller ships with exactly one permission, local storage for your saved speeds. The volume booster can hear the tab you point it at and nothing else. The audit tools read the page when you click the icon and then they are done.

There is one honest exception in the set, and I would rather name it than have you find it. The video speed controller does run a small script on every page, because the keyboard shortcuts have to work the instant a video appears and waiting for you to open a popup first would make it a different product. That script looks for video and audio elements. It does nothing else, it makes no network calls at all, and I would rather explain that than pretend the set is perfect.

If you install something of mine and the permission prompt looks bigger than the job, treat that as a bug and send it to me.

The second thing I care about is where your data goes, which in almost every case is nowhere. No accounts, no servers, no analytics. The rank checker sends the place name you type to a free geocoding service so it can turn "Austin, TX" into coordinates, and that is the only outbound call anywhere in the collection. It's written down in the privacy policy rather than buried.