Shai-Hulud malware attack: Tinycolor and over 40 NPM packages compromised

Is there any way to install CLI tools from npmjs without being affected by a recent compromise?

Rust has `cargo install --locked`, which will use the pinned versions of dependencies from the lockfile, and these lockfiles are published for bin packages to crates.io.

But it seems npmjs doesn't allow publishing lockfiles, neither for libraries nor for CLI tools, so if you try to install let's say @google/gemini-cli, it will just pull the latest dependencies that fit the constraints in package.json. Is that true? Is it really this bad? If you try to install a CLI tool on a bad day when half of npmjs is compromised, you're out of luck?

How is that acceptable at all?

npm will use your lockfile if it’s present, otherwise yeah it’s pretty much whatever is tagged and latest at the time (and the version doesn’t even have to change). If npm respected every upstream lockfile, then it could never share a single version that satisfied all dependencies. The bigger issue here is that npm has such unrestricted and unsupervised access to the entire environment at all.

> If npm respected every upstream lockfile, then it could never share a single version that satisfied all dependencies.

I'm asking in the context of installing a single CLI tool into ~/bin or something. There's no requirement to satisfy all dependencies, because the only dependency I care about is that one CLI tool. All I want is an equivalent of what `cargo install --locked` does — use the top-level lockfile of the CLI tool itself.