What a poor take. Cooldowns certainly don't solve everything but 'out of the box' even with no vetters they'll help catch unauthorised releases on active projects because it's more time to notice.

Account takeovers, deployment exploits whatever the root cause, given a few days it's incredibly likely maintainers will notice they've released an unexpected update and fix/sound an alarm. A lot of existing cases like this people realise pretty fast, but the packages might still be live for a few hours as NPM catches up. Cooldown entirely removes that 'updated at the wrong time' issue, an no-one even needs to actually look at the code at all.

For inactive or intentionally malicious maintainers, yes it relies on vetting. But it's hardly a mythical 'canary' - there are already a lot of companies scanning every popular npm package, auditing new ones, or just generally analysing threats. I can think of at least 4 such companies without even trying, I'm sure there's loads more.

And they'll continue because it's not warm hearted so much as promoting/testing their security scanning services and tools so they can get the kudos from being the first to spot X etc. Which often does hit the front of HN or reddit, but they don't need the massive cyber loudspeaker to be effective. Flagging the issue to maintainers, reporting to NPM security - with a cooldown in place the package can be voided before anyone really gets the chance to install it. This is literally how a lot of things are spotted already, just with that 'updated at the wrong time' issue catching unlucky people out.

Does it solve everything? No. Will it reduce the amount of problems that make it to end users? Obviously yes.

And for all the author's 'no one will do this', 'waiting for Godot' cries - what do they recommend? Running your own audits, using LLMs, static analysis and testing it yourself. Basically being the veter they claim no-one will be! Unless they don't intend to sound the alarm themselves, they are literally the canary they're looking for.

Cooldowns aren't magic, but they're not security theater either.