It's not. Stop being in an echo chamber. Refer to this post for more valid criticism: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42653176

Setting aside agreement or disagreement, what about that comment is striking you as symptomatic of coming from an echo chamber?

Oh please. It's a factual argument and you've contributed nothing to it apart from steering away from the goalpost

Let's say I'm doing all of those things, and am prepared to atone for my sins.

And I just want to know what you found echo chamberry about the other comment. Can you enlighten me? Maybe that way I can avoid all of the mistakes that I'm making.

In order:

It is; the authors appear to be operating in a model where they completely trust app authors and nobody else, though they never actually spell out the threat model (which really should make us view their assessment skeptically anyways), where F-Droid specifically avoids trusting app authors. Nearly all of their objections come down to this single difference.

What echo chamber? I'm not aware of anyone else arguing this position.

That post contains 3 items: One fixed audit finding that only affects initial install of an app, one claim of problems that are unspecified and therefore impossible to assess, and one allegation of poor behavior (which is worth noting but not a security concern).

To add insult to the injury, they claim that most people should stick to Play Store - a malware repository controlled by an ad distribution company - for better privacy. We're supposed to take this seriously.

They had a much more convincing argument before the Play Store started forcing the same exact thing that they said was one of the main problems with F-Droid, and F-Droid started providing reproducible builds.