The problem with measures such as 2FA is that they are voluntarily implemented only by users who are most concerned about security, whereas users setting their password to "password" are on the opposite end of the spectrum.
What we really need is (1) 2FA and other enhanced security measures and (2) the ability to exclude all packages from a project, whether imported directly or indirectly, that do not abide with a minimum level of security.
I like the direction you’re heading with this, as it touches on supply-chain issues that have most folks just throwing their hands up. What would be most interesting is a standard framework for expressing a security policy combined with some hooks in the build tooling.
I also wonder whether it would be appropriate for the repositories themselves to hold maintainers to a minimum standard as well as their own claims. E.g., package maintainers must set a >12 character password and employ 2fa.
In reality, this isn’t just an NPM issue. I suspect that similar issues plague just about every package management framework, App Store, or CDN out there. Having a couple of standardized approaches would enable developers who care to automate checks and start to generate new incentives for the folks that are publishing their work to follow some basic standards.
This is exactly what is needed. Publish on each user's profile whether their account is secure, and provide an option in the client to disallow upgrading package versions owned by users that don't comply.
You could even try to crack the password of any user with enough (by some threshold) downloads using known leaked passwords as seeds, and mark them as insecure and reset their password if successful.
You're talking about actions that security-minded parties could take already, if they cared to do so. Run your own registry, and audit everything that goes in, before it goes in. That would be a lot of work, but it would actually affect security to some degree. This idea that packages will be safe if only we inconvenience all package authors enough is just silly.
What we really need is (1) 2FA and other enhanced security measures and (2) the ability to exclude all packages from a project, whether imported directly or indirectly, that do not abide with a minimum level of security.