edit: VSCode has a verified marker for publishers but I don't know how that works or if Cursor does the same.
Also, a basic scan of the package would have flagged an ssh backdoor, no? It didn't seem to me like its obfuscation was very sophisticated.
Scanning is a curious one. It's not always obvious because developer tools have legitimate reasons to do a lot of these things. LLMs are better at understanding what it's actually doing now though so that might have worked. But who knows, people have snuck in backdoors into many things before.
They don’t do organization verification, but they do verify where code comes from. You may be sure that packages are built by alpine, which made sure that the dist files comes from the sources that the maintainers added, and the latter ensure that the sources are correct. In truth, it’s a very small circle of trust.