FWIW, as far as "scrutiny" goes, I think the track record of Red Hat and Debian/Ubuntu on this stuff is about as good as... well, basically any other distribution system I'm aware of. The Android and iOS stores have hosted malware, as has Microsoft's. Steam has pushed bad stuff. NPM is a straight up train wreck...
I mean, I agree in principle that it's a hard problem. But the actual solution we've landed on in the Linux world seems like... well, just not really the first thing we should be worried about.