One thing I don't quite get is how trusted publishing is supposed to be more secure. It still allows publishing if they pwn your workflow.

Is it purely more secure because they can't exfiltrate your secret keys to publish again?

I feel like if your workflow gets pwned you'd be rotating your keys anyways, so I'm not sure if the vendor lock-in is worth it.

Trusted staged publishing helps a lot: you have to independently pwn the workflow _and_ then complete a separate 2FA flow as a maintainer. The workflow never sees any keys that can publish independently.

Keys can be reused from anywhere. Trusted publishing means the attacker must trigger the specific workflow on GitHub, which is more difficult and leaves trace of actions on GitHub itself.