Zoltan Kochan, following a wave of incidents where common npm packages including debug were compromised with a phishing attack last week and nx was compromised with a credential catcher a few weeks ago:

There have been several incidents recently where popular packages were successfully attacked. To reduce the risk of installing a compromised version, we are introducing a new setting that delays the installation of newly released dependencies. In most cases, such attacks are discovered quickly and the malicious versions are removed from the registry within an hour.

The new setting is called minimumReleaseAge. It specifies the number of minutes that must pass after a version is published before pnpm will install it. For example, setting minimumReleaseAge: 1440 ensures that only packages released at least one day ago can be installed.