Yeah, Reagan functionally broke the system and every president and party since then has made tiny tweaks at best, this type of understaffing was common under Biden and Obama as well. Its just hit its breaking point.
Pretending this is a Trump only issue is covering for a whole lot of people who share the blame in addition to Trump.
I probably should have said "may/could" sneak in, I forgot the xz incident didn't quite make it to Debian (but would have had it not been caught)
I would say you are more than likely fine, malicious code does occasionally sneak into Debian distributed apps but you'll likely never encounter something that is outright fraudulent or a scam.
People who can't operate a computer will somehow become gods at following instructions if someone calls "from Microsoft"
I'm not really sure you can argue birthdate is the thin edge of the spear when the standard Linux user database already had fields for location, email, phone number, and real name. None of which have been used for anything up to this point, and systemd-homed is not as widely used.