Brave, Video Downloadhelper, and the Chrome Web Store

I wish to use Brave with Video Downloadhelper, as I had done for quite some time before the Chrome Web Store added an age restriction to the extension. I want nothing to do with Google, so the recent requirement of signing up for a Chrome Web Store account comes off as rather heavy-handed, to say the least. Moreover, I can’t even ask Video Downloadhelper’s staff about possible workarounds, because their forum is on Google Groups!

In my many months of checking by various search engines for a solution, I’ve not found even a hint of this being an issue with anyone else. This is baffling, and I’m starting to feel like the last privacy supporter on Earth! Why is there not groundswell support for so obvious a use case?

P.S.: What happened to the “temporarily allow” option in the shields settings? The removal makes it inordinately difficult to maintain privacy, for it’s all too easy to forget to manually revert a site’s permissions.