Comment by TeMPOraL

> How do other people handle this dilemma?

For me: consider this a form of paranoia and ignore it, while worrying more about cleanup costs of non-vetted packages.

Like, even if there is 5% chance that a program I download will start downloading global python or node packages, odds are within a year I'll deal with couple that have mutually incompatible requirements and are impossible to run without more VM surgery than I have patience for, and that I'll discover this only after a botched installation bricks software that used to work before.

But that's solvable with less extra work. Just throwaway containers. With no hand-wringing about read-only access or isolating it from network, because my threat modeling doesn't consider loss of privacy or any data leak from my personal local side to be realistic or impactful threat event (I mean, everything that matters is in someone else's cloud and by design not trivial to access) - OTOH, it assigns great magnitudes to loss of personal time.