It absolutely does. You trust the distro maintainer and have a security mechanism to ensure the scripts and binaries have not been tampered with. So virtually

It absolutely does. You trust the distro maintainer and have a security mechanism to ensure the scripts and binaries have not been tampered with. So virtually no risk of MitM and very little risk of malicious scripts and binaries. Reading script and decompiling binaries does not imply you understand every thing they do, but it does imply that you have an unlimited amount of time which is impractical at best.