As an end user I could not find an option to open the side panel
With that said, the chrome web store ecosystem has bigger problems infront of them. For example, loads of extensions outright just send every URL you visit (inc query params) over to their servers. Things like this just shouldn't happen, imagine you installed an extension from a few years back and you forgot about it, that's what happened to me with WhatRuns, which also scraped my AI chats.
I'm working on a tool to let people scan their extensions (https://amibeingpwned.com/) and I've found some utterly outrageous vulnerabilities, widespread affiliate fraud and widespread tracking.