We chose to trust because it lets us all do more cool and useful things faster. All of us.
That's good! It's also necessary to operate at this scale, where any of us (not just corporations, but every hacker using a package manager) can operate with some minimum level of expectation that while packages might break from time to time, the breakage isn't malicious and everyone's incentives are aligned to minimize it and correct issues as quickly as found. Imagine what the ecosystem would look like if we couldn't make that assumption? The legal warranty allows for, say, Debian to start sneaking keyboard harvesters into the binary blobs that they publish alongside the source... What would happen to Debian users if they did? What would happen to the entire GNU/Linux desktop ecosystem if every package manager chose to do that?
If that trust were to break at scale (i.e. if stunts like leftpad's removal breaking everyone became common, or FOSS developers were to begin doing even more malicious things that the "as-is" legal providing technically allows)... We'd all do fewer cool and useful things, and companies with money would do more of them out of sight.
I don't think that's an improvement over what we have now.
So yes, the buck has always stopped with the last mile developer putting other people's software together into a solution. That is a necessary requirement to have an open source ecosystem at all in a legal environment that demands that blame be assignable somewhere. But if we all start acting like that legal constraint is the only behavioral constraint that matters, we don't actually get to have an open source ecosystem.