In my experience this is fairly common for "what's changed" listings for extensions. It's probably mostly to do with how browsers don't provide any good native mechanism for that.
It's a pretty safe bet you can throw any mail that has "IMPORTANT" printed on the envelope in the trash.
Every online store, software vendor and web site wishes they could get my attention for an "IMPORTANT" message at least 100x more often than I wish they did.
Browser extensions already have access to privileged APIs that websites cannot use, however, so providing this ability to extensions !== providing it to medium.com.
The kind of company that would abuse an extension API like this for marketing is just the kind of company I wouldn't trust for extensions, so even spammy marketing messages would still be a useful signal (to uninstall).
I do care - I install tools because they're useful, and if they become more useful from new features, that's useful to know. I've definitely found some good gems to improve my workflow that I don't think I'd have discovered without the changelog.
What I don't particularly care about is "performance optimizations and bug fixes". If that's all you have to say about your latest release, just don't bother telling me. I suspect that's where some of the fatigue from release notes comes from.
I recently received a phone call from Dexcom, since they make a continuous glucose monitor that I wear. The call was to warn me not to upgrade to iOS 16 as their app would immediately crash and I wouldn’t be able to view my blood sugar. I was told a fix was being deployed and I would receive an email when it was safe to upgrade.
Sure enough, a week later I received an email saying it was safe to upgrade to iOS 16, provided I updated the app in the App Store first.
And as frustrated as I was that a company that large with a product so safety critical had waited literally months after the iOS betas before testing iOS16, I was more frustrated when I read the release notes for this incredibly important update:
In most cases yes, but a change in ownership is definitely something I want to know about.
I'd prefer a less intrusive way of notifying me of the change, but in this case the extension in question is one that works passively in the background, and doesn't have a UI that users regularly interact with. I can't really think of a better way to inform people, except maybe via the notification API?
