I don't believe it ever does so without first asking for permission?

It did it without my permission, it's a small model to rename and group tabs, though, no more than 50M in size.

wait, hang on, I can't be the only person with 300 tabs open for whom that would actually be useful

Use seamonkey or palemoon

Does seamonkey still work on modern internet? Last time I tried it to open Notion, nothing was displayed. Works great on old world stuff though.

It should, it has some issue rendering some sites (Google's AI overview acted funny but if you still use google you aren't their intended audience anyway) but otherwise works fine on content focused sites. Youtube works iirc, idk about adblock though (theres uBlock legacy but that hasn't been updated in a bit)