NPM's release cooldown is security theater

The article argues that release cooldowns implemented by package managers like npm, pnpm, and yarn as security measures are ineffective "security theater." The author contends that cooldowns fail because no one acts as an early adopter to detect malicious packages during the waiting period, and CI/CD pipelines often merge untrusted code without proper review. Instead, the author recommends active security practices like static analysis tools, sandboxing, and LLM-assisted code audits before dependencies are installed, rather than relying on passive waiting periods.