No, it really doesn't scale that well. 'Thousands' of packages is laughable compared to the scale of npm. And even at the 'thousands' scale distros are often laughably out of date because they're so slow to update their packages.

You are of course right that a signed package ecosystem would be great, it's just that you're asking people to do this labour for you for free. If you pay some third party to verify and sign packages for you? That's totally fine. Asking maintainers already under tremendous pressure to do yet another labour-intensive security task so you can benefit for free? That's out of balance.

Are they incapable of doing it? Probably not. Does it take real labour and effort to do it? Absolutely.

My 7 teammates and I on stagex actually maintain all this zero-trust signing and release process I am suggesting for several hundred packages and counting. Not asking anyone to do hundreds like my team and I are, but if authors could just at least do the bare minimum for the code they directly author that would eliminate the last gaping hole in the supply chain.