[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44434355

What would it take to not fear installing software? This isn't a npm problem, its a computing problem in general. Spaces like this are generally pretty against any sort of restrictions or limitations being put on computers under the name of safety (see Manifest v3)

The majority were noticed by maintainers or third party groups noticing things like releases not tied to a source tag, many rapid releases, etc.

Cooldowns won’t stop everything, but it makes a malicious release significantly more likely to be noticed

There are still research firms who are actively and aggressively scanning new packages once they are pushed. For example socket.dev pulls new packages across ecosystems and performs automated analysis and runs it in a sandbox. We don't have to have them go boom in someone's production repos to find out there is a problem.

The reality is that each update is its own potential security issue and with supply chain attacks being all too frequent, it's not a panacea.

This elegantly mitigates three problems in one go: update churn, dependency hell, and supply chain attack surface.

It also, frankly, tends to make the code easier to understand. I’m not a huge NIH person but I do have to say that a lot of packages these days tend to encourage ways of doing things that are unnecessarily complex. More than once I’ve replaced a dependency with homegrown code and reduced LOC in the same commit.

(This cuts both ways: I’d say that distribution package managers have learned valuable lessons about what users actually want from language package managers. Learning is a good thing.)