I would not call an extension with 5K users, popular. Or did PCWorld confuse it with uBO?
uBlock Origin uses "ManifestV2" of a browser. Chrome is moving to "ManifestV3" and uBlock Origin has been adapted to work with ManifestV3 on Chrome.
The ManifestV3 version of uBlock Origin has some advantages and the author made recently it available as an option to the Firefox users as "uBlock Origin Lite". One advantage, it's lightweight. Works better on slower computers.
wasn't ubo lite a remedy for chrome users?
Someone posted yesterday and some discussions were made. See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41707418
uBlock Origin Lite (uBOL) was meant to mitigate the Manifest V3 (MV3) that Chrome/Chromium moved on to this year which severely hindered how an ad-blocker works. Apparently some people prefer uBOL over the original uBlock Origin (uBO) as it's less resource-intensive, especially in less powerful devices like Firefox on an Android.
After pulling from the Firefox add-on store (AMO), users can still receive updates from Github page, so no big deal for users I guess? Sideload it is somewhat more complicated so some users will not use it and some others may consider this a hazard and pull away from installing it.