Building on what @juraj.masiar shared, there are also plans to remove the user interaction requirement from other similar UI surfaces like the pageAction and sidebarAction APIs.
That said, I still think we have a broader problem with reacting to user actions asynchronously in background event listeners. For example, say you use the action.onClicked event to trigger a permissions.request() call, but first you need to fetch a value from storage in order to make the correct permission request. While I can’t promise any specific action, it’s at least a problem that we’re aware of.