NPM has always been commercial (rather than managed by a foundation), and it was nominally acquired by GitHub rather than Microsoft, so at some level as long as GitHub is not causing issues (noting the recent GitHub changes should maybe also imply some consideration of problems for NPM), NPM is "safe".

Astral on the other hand has basically been rewrites in Rust of existing community-based open source tools, for which there is always the question of how such work is funded. PYX (which is an interesting choice of name given the conflicts with pyrex/cython filenames) from what we can see here appears to be in a similar vein, competing with PyPI and making changes which seemingly require their client (uv) be used.

Anaconda/ContinuumIO was also treated with similar suspicion to Astral, so I don't think it's Astral in particular, it's more they both are operating in the part of the ecosystem where it is comparatively easy to lock out community-based open source tools (which the Python ecosystem appears to have been better at setting up and maintaining than the JS ecosystem).