I am quite confused by your assumptions. I am just making a joke about people trying to avoid surveillance capitalism tools on one side and gleefully installing aur packages from random people on the other side, potentially making their surveillance exposure worse. I'm part of them some time because it's too hard to verify everything everytime.

i can empathize with those infected but it's important to note that the source of this issue is still installing random stuff from random people. the aur is not the same as arch repos, and users wanting to opt in need to take more precautions than usual

That's probably simply a more skeptical take of my own newbie perspective: the automated update systems on Linux are feeling increasingly scary since their maintainers can get hacked... I'm on Mint and I wish that the Update Manager would show changelogs per update, at least (even if those, too, can be fabricated)...