You're basically saying that f-droid is better because it's small. Nothing to do with its selling point of being FOSS.

(And for the record I'm an f-droid user)

1) What does it matter? If it's better by being small, it's still better.

2) The F-Droid maintainers manually build the apps on F-Droid from the respective code repositories. They will notice when something like that is off. This has to do with it being FOSS.

And if you're wanting to tell me that this doesn't scale, not really, no, but it's the same thing that Linux distros have been doing for a long time and Red Hat, SUSE, Canonical actually do have a crapton of users, especially on the server side.

Manual code inspection and FOSS or closed is entirely orthogonal to typo squatting of package names.

Every one of those distros gets around volume of desired apps by allowing the inclusion of third-party repos (e.g. current Python or docker) which in turn introduces typo squatting as a vector.

You're asking for app store maintainers to slow everything to a crawl and never get popular. No entity which wants to be successful will do that, corporate or otherwise.

They don't. More exactly, they try to vet things, after the fact, and not covering anything. Source : their own faq.

I skimmed their docs and I don't see any sort of language that corroborates what you are claiming.

They DO seem to have some sort of review process in place:

https://f-droid.org/en/docs/Inclusion_How-To/

See: Application Review Process.

I don't know how exhaustive it is or how effective it is in practice though.

They don't do a thorough code review, but they are human beings and they manually build the software from its code repository, so they will notice these kind of discrepancies.

They have software dev process with actual human, inside.