With regards to sandboxing etc. maybe. With regards to packages? Official repos support signing and usually rely on maintainers with proven track records. AUR was a honor system and since some people are total basement losers, you can't rely on that.

Castles made of sand slips into the sea, eventually

Better than the commercial alternatives

More so than, say, Windows? Really?

And no, "people using one Linux distro can opt in to possibly getting pwned by each other by making use of a third-party software depot" does not reflect upon the entirety of the Linux world.

I disagree. Maintainers for the major distributions take their roles very seriously, and do a very good job generally of filtering out malicious packages. The AUR is an outlier, being essentially an unmaintained wild west.