One way to address this is to move to a traditional "debian" style system, where packages are people affiliated with / known by Debian/Mozilla/Google, and specifically aren't the developers of the software themselves. The software is written by Developer X, but is then packaged and distributed by Packager Y, who ideally has no commercial affiliation with Developer X. If Developer X sells out to Malware Corp Z, end users can hope that Packager Y isn't part of that deal and prevents the malware from being packaged and distributed. This still isn't bullet-proof, but it's a lot better.
Also devs should get into the habit of providing sha256 hashes on offical channels (i.e., github readme) so users can validate (if its possible to validate a pkg before executing malicious code in the python ecosystem, I'm not sure how that'd work).
I would think the easy solution is to publish a public signing key per-person or per-project, and then sign individual files with that. So, GPG.
This is an excellent idea. Authors are something we are digging into heavily as part of an ongoing effort to improve trust in the open source ecosystem.
If we are talking typos or other human errors, guess we could only warn people that there are other package with similar name available. Can't predict what people have in mind when they make a typo.
[1] https://www.cisa.gov/uscert/ncas/current-activity/2021/10/22...