I have an friend that starts an project next month that will rely on npm. He is quite a noob and didn't code in ages. He will have almost no clue how to harden against this, he will probably not even notice if he becomes a victim until something really bad happens.
Pretty sad.
"a friend" because friend starts with a consonant sound, not a vowel sound. "a project" for the same reason.
HTH.
At least make them run pnpm instead of npm, disabling post-install scripts. https://pnpm.io/supply-chain-security