GitHub back in September already published their roadmap of mitigations to NPM supply chain attacks:

https://github.blog/security/supply-chain-security/our-plan-...

I'm guessing no one yet wants to spend the money it takes for centralized, trusted testing where the test harnesses employ sandboxing and default-deny installs, Deterministic Simulated Testing (DST), or other techniques. And the sheer scale of NPM package modifications per week makes human in the loop-based defense daunting, to the point that only a small "gold standard" subset of packages that has a more reasonable volume of changes might be the only palatable alternative.

What are the thoughts of those deep inside the intersection of NPM and cybersecurity?

You would need to hear the thoughts of those deep inside the intersection of money and money.