There has been a lot of pain at my various jobs installing a safe global npm config on every developer machine, asking people not to disable it, checking it with mdm tools. A safer out-of-the-box configuration is long overdue.

Just dont use npm. Use a package manager which doesn't execute postinstall by default. The switch is incredibly simple.

Which package manager is that, and what caveats does it offer?

Pnpm - installs are faster to boot. We haven’t missed anything

pnpm

What do you mean by safe config? If you're trying to mandate a cooldown period or a whitelist/blacklist of packages, the correct approach is to configure a company-controlled registry that pulls from the upstream npm registry while enforcing your desired policies.