Resolved the issue here https://github.com/ajayyy/DeArrow/issues/158#issuecomment-1761901080

There was a misunderstanding

Response to edit:

The defaults are chosen in the way that I, and many others, like to use the extension. They are on the aggressive side, but that's why I made the extension so customizable. There are numerous options to turn down the aggressiveness, and you can configure all of these options per channel to be able to be aggressive with some channels, but less aggressive with others.

People have different opinions on what they like, I personally like all titles auto formatted and having all thumbnails replaced.

About the license, there will always be a free option, and all license keys are unlimited use, so you can use them on new devices and you can even share it with your friends.

I promise to never remove this, and I wouldn't want to do this anyway, as I want as many people to using DeArrow as possible, as that's how crowdsourced extensions works.

The soft-ish paywall acts as an aggressive donation barrier convincing a few people to donate, but still allowing everyone else to use the extension with all it's features just like anyone else. It is not meant to restrict who is using the extension. Only a certain amount of people need to pay to make it work.

Thanks to the paywall system, I am now earning enough money that I will be able to work on SponsorBlock and DeArrow full time when I graduate school in January and I am very much looking forward to that :)

Original Response:

I think you are misunderstanding some parts of the extension. The things you are talking about are not human submissions, but configurable automatic systems enabled by default.

By default, it auto-formats titles if no user submission exists. These are not submitted by users, but an automatic formatting system. You can change how this auto-formatting works in the options and also disable it.

By default, it shows a random screenshot from the videos from thumbnails if there is no human submission. You can also configure this in settings if you don't like that behavior, or disable thumbnail replacements altogether if that's not your thing.

Lastly, it is not possible for me to "rug-pull", as the code is open source under a copy-left license, and the database is publicly downloadable, and several other people are actively mirroring this data.

Hope that makes things clearer :)

Just so you know, you can use keys on unlimited devices/browsers. You can view your license key in the options or popup.

But staying on Firefox is a very good option anyway :)

You may have missed the text on the "request free access" prompt, but originally it was supposed to take 3 weeks. 1.2.16 changes the "request free access" time to 3 days instead as that seems like a more reasonable duration, so once you update, you should get access much quicker.

Use the request free access option :)