1. I genuinely don't understand why.
2. If it is true that people are the failing factor, then nothing is going to help. Hardware keys? No problem, a human will use the hardware key to sign a malicious action.
You never make a mistake? Never ever? It's a question of numbers. If the likelihood of making a mistake is 1 in 10000 emails, send out links to 10.000 package maintainers, and you've got a 63% chance of someone making that mistake.
I trust the user did this calculation. I didn't.
The major difference between passkeys and hardware 2fa (FIDO2/yubikeys) and TOTP/SMS/Email solutions is that the passkey/yubikey _also_ securely validates the site it's communicating with before sending validation, making traditional phishing attacks all but impossible.
It's a war of attrition. You can keep bombarding developers with new and clever ways of trying to obtain their credentials or get them to click on some link while signed in. It only has to succeed once. No one is 100% vigilant all the time. If you think you're the exception, you're probably deluding yourself.
There's something broken in a system where one moment of inattention by one person can result in oodles of people ending up with compromised software, and I don't think it's the person that's broken.
I'll get a lot of pushback for this, but the main problem are ecosystems that encourage using packages published by one person. I call these "some person with a github" packages, and I typically go through codebases to try to remove these dependencies specifically because of this threat vector.
Packages that are developed by a team with code multiple code reviewers and a process are still at risk, don't get me wrong. But the risk is much less if one person does not have the power to unilaterally merge a PR, and more-so if its backed by an organization that has multiple active devs and processes for reviews.
If you do need to depend on these one-person packages, I'd recommend forking and carefully merging in changes, or pinning versions and manually reviewing all commits before upgrading versions. Thats probably intractable for a lot of projects, but thats honestly something that we as developers need to fix by raising the bar for what dependencies we include.
Nothing will reduce incidents to 0, but many things can move us closer to 0.