That headline is quite misleading … the malicious extension only had a few hundred installs, not millions. They just copied an existing extension that does have 7 millions installs. They did went quite far by registering a URL. Of course it is bad that stuff like this manages to get on the store, but as long as you check what you are installing, you should be fine.
Ah it makes more sense that way, I didn’t read the title as if they were talking about all the extensions that they found summed together. This does make it really clear that you should always check extensions when installing them, and not just install extensions with a low install base from an unknown author.