The problem with cooldowns is that the more people use them, the less effective they become.

Well, luckily, those who find the malicious activity are usually companies who do this proactively (for the good of the community, and understandably also for marketing). There are several who seem to be trying to be the first to announce, and usually succeed. IMHO it should be Microsoft (as owners of GitHub, owners of npm) who should take the helm and spend the tokens to scan each new package for malicious code. It gets easier and easier to detect as models improve (also gets easier and easier to create, and try to avoid detection on the other hand)

The hypothesis you're referring to is something like "if everyone uses a 7-day cooldown, then the malware just doesn't get discovered for 7 days?", right?

An alternative hypothesis: what if 7-day cooldowns incentivize security scanners, researchers, and downstream packagers to race to uncover problems within an 7-day window after each release?

Without some actual evidence, I'm not sure which of these is correct, but I'm pretty sure it's not productive to state either one of these as an accepted fact.

That was my first instinct as well but I'm not sure how true it really is.

Many companies exist now whose main product is supply chain vetting and scanning (this article is from one such company). They are usually the ones writing up and sharing articles like this - so the community would more than likely hear about it even if nobody was actually using the package yet.

care to elaborate?