It absolutely matters. Many people install packages for front-end usage which would only be imported in the browser sandbox. Additionally, a package may be installed in a dev environment for inspection/testing before deciding whether to use it in production.

To me it's quite unexpected/scary that installing a package on my dev machine can execute arbitrary code before I ever have a chance to inspect the package to see whether I want to use it.

I've been using pnpm and it does not run lifecycle scripts by default. Asks for confirmation and creates a whitelist if you allow things. Might be the better default.