There has been a lot of pain at my various jobs installing a safe global npm config on every developer machine, asking people not to disable it, checking it with mdm tools. A safer out-of-the-box configuration is long overdue.
People can still bypass these measures if they're determined enough (offline package installs, vendoring dependencies, etc.) but making circumvention impossible to do accidentally and inconvenient to do deliberately solves the problem 99% of the way.