Also the APT and RPM world lets packages sit for a long time - those are called "testing" and "unstable" in the Debian world. It's slow, but it seems hard to move intentional exploits with short-term payoffs through as far as we can see.

That's also why I am actively moving a fundamental and important internal service we have to just use python dependencies packaged in Debian stable packages. Sure, it may be a year or two behind in features, I may loose a nice debugging tool or two, but it is a very stable footprint, has security updates, breaks rarely. For ops-internal scripting and tooling, it's good.

Yeah with RPM and dpkg you're trusting the distro, or maybe individual distro maintainers, depending on how you consider it. But there are norms in the distro about what those scripts are for and how to use them, and there's some social enforcement around that.

The real issue for hooks in packaging formats like those is when you start adding third-party vendor repositories, e.g., Zoom, Google Chrome, Discord. None of the social enforcement mechanisms are there and the companies behind the products I just mentioned all have histories of abusing them.

That's why it's generally better to use Flatpak for things like that if your distro itself doesn't include them.

Yes and typically updates take a while to be deployed...