alt Hacker NewsI mostly use languages where the feature doesn't even exist. We don't generally miss it.
I also blocked a proposed mandatory dependabot at work a few months back because I didn't like the way it created a pipeline for any hacker to push a hacked dependency straight into someone's codebase. I'm lifting my objection now that dependabot is defaulting to a 3-day cooldown, though the code bases I'm managing I'm setting to 7 days. (Not to be behind everyone else; I'd be fine if everyone joined me at 7 days. I don't really accept the freeloading objection, there's plenty of entities scanning things now no matter what cooldown you set. I just think 3 is a little tight to expect the full discovery and remediation to take place.)
So, whatever sort of "but it's really hard! I bet you don't do it yourself" implications you may be trying to draw fall very flat. Or whatever you may have been trying to imply about trusting this step but not trusting others... no, I do defense in depth. Giving up on defense in depth because one step isn't enough... well, I think I've probably played the "you won't get very far in engineering" card enough, but hey, here's one last time.
Out of curiosity, which languages? The equivalent operations for C and C++ do generally involve a lot of arbitrary code execution to do the build, for example, they just don't have one central package manager and repository. I can't think of any package managers off the top of my head that don't have some similar feature, but I am obviously not familiar with all of them.
You can see my other responses in this thread about what I think of this in the context of defence in depth. I think disabling install hooks is a very weak defence with substantial downsides and defence in depth does not mean just taking every option that might foil some attack. There are much better means to get a robust extra layer of defence in this context, which is mainly about protecting your publishing pipelines from become a vector for a worm.