BTW a curated mirror of <whatever ecosystem> packages, where every package is guaranteed to have been analyzed and tested, could be an easy sell now. Also relatively easy to create, with the help of AI. A $200 every time is less pleasant than, say, $100/mo for the entire org.
Docker does something vaguely similar for Docker images, for free though.
I don't read it in detail because reading in detail is precisely what I delegate to the harness. The alternative is that I delegate all this trust to package managers and the maintainers which quite clearly is a bad idea.
Whether the $$ pricetag is worth it is.. relative. Also in Go you don't update all that often, really when something either breaks or there is a legitimate security reason to do so, which in deep systems software is quite infrequent.
Funnily enough for frontend NPM code our policy was to never ever upgrade and run with locked dependencies, running few years old JS deps. For internal dashboards it was perfectly fine, never missed a feature and never had a supply chain close call.
What do you when a critical vulnerability gets discovered and you have to update a package? How many critical/high severity vulnerabilities are you running with in production every day to avoid supply chain attacks?
Critical severity vulnerabilities are only critical when they are reachable, but are completely meaningless if your application doesn't touch that code at all. It's objectively more risky to "patch" those by updating dependencies than just let them be there.
How is it not the default in npm?
I ditched npm for yarn years ago because it had saner dependency resolution (npm's peer dependency algorithm was a constantly moving target), and now I've switched from yarn to bun because it doesn't run hooks in dependencies by default. It also helps that it installs dependencies 10x faster.
At least not if you haven’t edited your package.json manually.