> I also think legitimacy by proxy is gross

I disagree, legitimacy by proxy is a very useful initial signal. Someone who works on the gRPC team at a large API distributor is more likely to have better advice on best practices for protobufs, than someone who works on optimizing ray-tracers for TempleOS. Relying on proxies, and likelihoods, is crucial for the timely processing of information. We heavily rely on at least some level of trust - otherwise we would have to completely verify every single thing that anyone says, before we can begin to do anything with the information.