for what it's worth I don't believe that Chrome is saving passwords in plain text.
Go into "Settings". Click "Show advanced settings...". Click "Manage passwords". Mouse over the dots of one of your passwords and click "Show".
Chrome needs the plain text version of your password so it can submit it to a website. It can't separately negotiate with each website a way to store a hash that it will accept.
Oh sure. It can decrypt them and show them to you, but they don't exist on your hard drive unencrypted. That may or may not be a trivial difference depending on the OS level file permissions.
Let's say you and I share a computer. I log on to my user account and use Chrome and allow it to store passwords. It encrypts them and stores them in my user space with appropriate permissions. You can't get to the file where my passwords are stored, and even if you could you can't decrypt them without my user credentials.
Now consider Doninion writing usernames and passwords to a log in C:\program files (or the equivalent). If every user who uses this app is required to have permissions to that folder then every user will be able to see that log. So you or I could look in the logs and see the username and password of the other.
See the difference?
I mean, this is much less problematic (at least an order of magnitude so) than sending passwords in plain text, but it's still Not Good for certain use cases.