Log4Shell was hardly a supply-chain attack - just a latent bug in a widely-used library. That can happen anywhere.

Maven to this day represents my ideal of package distribution. Immutable versions save so much trouble and I really don't understand why, in the age of left-pad, other people looked at that and said, "nah, I'm good with this."

Completely agree. NPM has the only registry where massive supply chain attacks happen several times a year. Mainly the fault lies with NPM itself, but much of it is just a terrible opsec culture in the community.

Most package.jsons I see have semver operators on every dependency, so patches spread incredibly quickly. Package namespacing is not enforced, so there is no way of knowing who the maintainer is without looking it up on the registry first; for this reason many of the most popular packages are basically side projects maintained by a single developer*. Post-install scripts are enabled by default unless you use pnpm or bun.

When you combine all these factors, you get the absolute disaster of an ecosystem that NPM is.

*Not really the case for Axios as they are at least somewhat organized and financed via sponsors.

The semantics are irrelevant. The effect is what's important: Hijacking widely used software to exploit systems. The OC is somehow under the illusion that avoiding JS altogether is a silver bullet for avoiding this.

Forest > Trees