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.
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.
Yet the large actors still publish malicious updates to extensions. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
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.