That is not entirely true. There are both automatic and manual checks for packages that are submitted for registration, see, e.g., the discussion in
Hopefully many, as Julia Computing runs automated checks about this whenever releasing new versions.
There are minimum requirements for packages at registration time, and stricter requirements for 1.0 versions. I would be very open to making automated checks for new registrations stricter than they currently are. Running tests and checking for 50% unit test coverage in particular is something that’s been long on my mind. That’s a discussion to be had separately, though
There is an expectation for registered packages that they continue to be maintained. If they become unmaintained: if nobody is submitting PRs and they continue to work, not problem. When PRs are submitted but not reviewed or merged, as registry maintainers we actively facilitate new co-maintainers being added to old projects, in whatever form is appropriate. In the most extreme version of this, we have a form of “eminent domain” where an unmaintained package is forked to a new organization with new maintainers, and the the registry is modified to point to that new fork – even without the involvement of the original package author (if they were hit by the proverbial bus and have been unresponsive despite several months of communication attempts across different channels)
The bottom line is that the General registry is not free-for-all (as discussed in the intro to the previous discussion about vibe-coded packages), but is a shared community resource