Not to beat the dead horse, but ths floored me when I realized it so I keep trying to shout it at the top of my lungs.

There is no gate you can put on a Trusted Publisher setup in github which requires 2fa to remove. Full stop. 2fa on github gates some actions, but with a token with the right scope you can just disable the gating of workflow-runs-on-approve, branch protection, anything besides I think repo deletion and renaming.

And in my experience most maintainers will have repo admin perms by nature of the maintainer team being small and high trust. Your point is well taken, however, that said stolen token does need to have high enough privileges. But if you are the lead maintainer of your project, your gh token just comes with admin on your repo scope.