Hey Breci -
I hear and appreciate your passion. It’s awesome to hear about the time and energy you have put into your Extension, stories like yours are exactly why we started the Extensions program in the first place. 
A big part of why we want to move quickly with this update is because we want to prevent too many developers from going down a path creating components that will need to change and cause even more future frustration. You are right in saying this should have been what component Extensions were to start - we are much more confident that this design will actually enable streamers and viewers to have a better experience with components than what is currently in the wild.
The suggested path forward if your Extension needs to be default-visible is to support it in the overlay anchor point. The functionality of overlays is not changing in that they are still visible by default on channel load and now will have no risk of being obscured by component iframes.