[IsaacSchlueter]

It's been a few years since I was directly involved in engineering, but my fairly educated understanding is that it's more around reading of possibly-private packages than publishing.

Publishing is a relatively rare event compared with reading, but in a world of private packages, orgs, and teams, the "can {user} read {object}" gets more complicated. It probably wouldn't be CPU bound if not for the sheer scale we're dealing with, but once all the IO bottlenecks are resolved, you still have to check to make sure that a login token is valid, then get the user associated with it, then check the teams/orgs/users with access to a thing (which might be public, in which case, the problem is a lot simpler, but you still have to get that info and check it), and then whether the user is in any of those groups. So there's a straightforward but relevant bit of CPU work to be done, and that's where Rust shines.