It occurs to me that there is one major feature missing from the Julia package manager that others (conda, pip, etc.) have, and that is a built-in search. How do people discover packages currently? Well, I go to the juliapackages.com website and search. There are even sorting options. What if users could do that with Pkg?
Something like
pkg> search tensor # search all package names/readme files for the word "tensor"
# it could even add a sort feature like the website!
pkg> search tensor --sort github_stars
If a hypothetical pkg search feature defaulted to sorting by Github stars (or # of downloads), then users are (hopefully) steered towards higher quality packages and the need for a curated registry may be mitigated somewhat. Also, vibe coded packages would automatically appear at the bottom until enough users gave them stars/downloads, which (hopefully) would show they are decent.
Also this functionality already exists in the juliapackages.com website! So maybe it wouldn’t be terribly difficult to get it working in Pkg (he says knowing nothing about pkg internals)? The best part of this as a potential solution is that it is purely a code solution and does not require an individual judgement call on a particular package.