Apparently this thing got approved for the chrome store, which confirms that "store" approvals are near worthless for malware filtering.

one point of view is why bother with any of this, google knows exactly what honey is doing, they could remove honey from chrome with the stroke of a pen, and that would be that.

It's not malware. Marketing companies stealing commission from each other isn't malware. Giving the user less than the best possible deal isn't malware. It doesn't even upload your cookies to see if you're a tester - it does that on the client.