Flathub is not unvetted. Every submission goes through human review. If a piece of software requires an unnecessary permission (i.e. if someone submits an alarm clock program that requires home folder access and internet access), it will get rejected. If a developer updates their software and changes the required permissions, the update won't get pushed to users until it goes through human review.
Besides this, for open source packages, the code gets built on Flathub's build servers without internet access. The source code associated with a given Flathub package version must be either a specific Git commit (verified with a commit hash) or a release tarball (verified with a sha256 hash). This means that it's always possible to verify that the code a developer publishes corresponds to the binaries being shipped to users. Closed source packages get a big warning on their Flathub pages saying that the program's code is proprietary and not auditable.
With the traditional distro packaging model, the requirements to become a maintainer are stringent and there's human review when a package is added, but there's typically no review after that point. If you'd like a recent example of the drawbacks of this system, see here: https://security.opensuse.org/2025/05/07/deepin-desktop-remo... . After the OpenSUSE security team rejected certain components of the Deepin DE for containing major security problems (including multiple root privilege escalation vulnerabilities), the Deepin maintainer smuggled them in anyway through an innocuous looking package called "deepin-feature-enable" and nobody in the security team noticed for several years. I'm not trying to call out the OpenSUSE security team here, I'm sure they don't have the resources to vet random packages. I'm saying that expecting maintainers to never ship malicious code because they went through the process to become a maintainer is a weakness of the traditional distro packaging model.
