I’m talking about community vetting. It’s usually easier to find discussions on the internet where people have discussed and scrutinized desktop apps (e.g. “this app phones home”) than it is to find the same for most browser extensions (which are often only heard about after having been turned into malware).

The tooling is often better there too, e.g. one can keep a short leash on app network activity with Little Snitch and similar but I’m not aware of an equivalent for browser extensions.