Absolutely correct. CRAN takes down and rejects packages all the time for minor issues and violations of their rules and guidelines. And there are a lot of them: https://cran.r-project.org/doc/manuals/r-release/R-exts.html

The fact that there is a human (and one with expertise in R) reviewing each incoming package makes pure vibe coded slop much, much harder to get approved.

Even though I've dealt with this, I'm genuinely appreciative of requirements: out of many stipulations, packages that monkeypatch are prohibited (I have a few ones that add diagnostics to advance analyses), online API access needs robust error handling... and there is a conformance/diagnostic suite.

https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/policies.html

Yep, as someone who both uses lots of R packages and writes lots of R packages (which, in turn, import other R packages), I've grown to appreciate the strictness of CRAN: if a package is on the CRAN, I'm just about guaranteed to not have installation issues or have it screw up my environment. To me, that's the one major job of a package repository, and CRAN does it well, even if it does cause package authors pain at times :)