It's not whataboutism. If the claim is that google's actions with manifest v3 is "abusing its market position to their own benefit", but Apple did the same thing when it didn't stand to benefit from it, then it severely undermines that claim.
Sure, it doesn't rule out google was secretly intending on doing it, only internal memos or whatever can prove that definitively. But at the same time, to immediately conclude that google was "abusing its market position", you would have to be maximally uncharitable to google. That's a sad way to see the world. Take for instance, the flak that google got for banning third party cookies. If this is done by anyone else (eg. Firefox), this would be seen as a good thing. However, cynics have opposed this on the basis that such change would disadvantage third party ad networks more than google, thus google was "abusing its market position to their own benefit" and therefore the change was bad.
You talk about Google as if it's a person. You should take a step back and think to yourself why the changes were made to Manifest V3 that broke backwards compatibility, weakening ability to ad-blocking. Rule set based modification is one of the first features I'd think of when developing a systems of extensibility in browser, and they removed it.
The reasoning is obvious, and "plausible deniability" is not enough to give Google charity. The more difficult you make it to block ads, the more impressions, and the more money made. Yet you believe people should be "charitable" to the same company that can't hire the manpower to defend their own users against bad faith DCMA takedown notices. Because they ran the analysis, and it wasn't worth the cost.
Best case scenario, Chromium loses market share, implements the parts removed from V2, Google likely kicks the can down the road to Manifest V4.
There's no reason to believe companies deserve charitability. Companies are systems designed to extract maximum value, and when the world around that system changes, the system adjusts itself. It's not the systems fault for trying to get more value, it's our fault for letting them.
Ad blockers still run in Chrome - just not ublock origin. Google's ads are still blocked by those blockers. If they really were motivated to stop ad blocking wouldn't they have blocked all ad blockers?
Note: I'm upset too that ublock origin stopped working. I switched to ublock origin lite and it's mostly working, though there are some ads sneaking through. I'm not sure if that just means
(1) it needs an update
(2) I should look for another blocker (IIUC ublock origin lite is not maintained much?)
(3) It's impossible in V3 to block these few things that are currently not blocked.
Manifest v3 is not going to lose any meaningful marketshare. There continues to exist working adblock and most users won't notice any difference in functionality. I sure don't.
Manifest V3 has 100% market share for all "full featured" browsers. My understanding is that just yesterday, YouTube made a change that allows them to apply DRM to videos, with even the client side buffer maintaining encryption until playback. How long until we start seeing similar applied to websites/articles?
Eventually, there will be an overstep that make enough capable people mad, and those people will get together and make/mod something better.
I don't think those two can be compared at all. Safari didn't have proper plugin support at all, doesn't matter ad-blocking or not. Rich plugin ecosystem was one of the Chrome's selling point.
Sure, it doesn't rule out google was secretly intending on doing it, only internal memos or whatever can prove that definitively. But at the same time, to immediately conclude that google was "abusing its market position", you would have to be maximally uncharitable to google. That's a sad way to see the world. Take for instance, the flak that google got for banning third party cookies. If this is done by anyone else (eg. Firefox), this would be seen as a good thing. However, cynics have opposed this on the basis that such change would disadvantage third party ad networks more than google, thus google was "abusing its market position to their own benefit" and therefore the change was bad.