Yes, but that's already the case. My point was that in practice the current discrepancies observed don't represent a complete disconnect between the ground truth (the source repo) and the package index, they tend to be minor. So describing the situation as "nobody knows what 17% of the top crates.io packages do" is an overstatement.
If that's the case, it would be a lot simpler (and equally accurate) to say that "no one knows" what the source repo is doing, either! The median consumer of packages in any packaging ecosystem is absolutely not reading the entire source code of their dependencies, in either the ground truth or index form.
That's certainly true - and would also be true (maybe even moreso) if vendoring dependencies was widespread. Seems just as easy to hide things in a "vendored" directory that's 20x the size of the library.
That wasn't intentional. But also, I don't think "virtually" actually changes the meaning substantially; it has the same conventional meaning in that position as "effectively" or "might as well be nobody."
Serious consideration: Claude Mythos is going to change the risk envelope of this problem.
We're still thinking in the old mindset, whereas new tools are going to change how all of this is done.
In some years dependencies will undergo various types of automated vetting - bugs (various categories), memory, performance, correctness, etc. We need to think about how to scale this problem instead. We're not ready for it.