For SC security, the fewer points of attack between me and the source the better.

For other kinds of quality, I have my own tests which are much more relevant to my use cases than whatever the distro maintainers are doing.

I've been a DD and while distros do work to integrate disparate upstreams as well as possible, they rarely reject packages for being fundamentally low quality or make significant quality judgements qua their role as maintainer (only when they're a maintainer because they're also a direct user). Other distributions do even less than Debian.

I have seen scenarios where package maintainers have rejected updating packages because the upstream is compromised though.

Fedora currently packages 10646 crates. It's implausible that they're manually auditing each one at each upgrade for anything other than "test suites pass", let alone something like obfuscated security vulnerabilities.

In the end most distros will be saved by the fact they don't upgrade quickly. Which is also accomplished by MVS without putting another attack vector in the pipeline.

No person manages more than 250 packages (and he's a RH employee).

There's more than a hundred package maintainers (I'm not sure exactly how many), but the median is about 50 packages.

Do you think people can't keep up with the updates for 50 packages?

I think I don't want "more than a hundred" additional points of trust, especially if they're trying to audit 50+ projects with various levels of familiarity each. And no, I don't believe one person can give a real audit to 50 packages each release even if was their actual job.

To paraphrase, all "more than a hundred" of those people need to be lucky every time.