I'm reading through all these responses and it sounds like nobody read the article. Everybody keeps bringing up JVM SecurityManager, or how granular Deno's per

I'm reading through all these responses and it sounds like nobody read the article. Everybody keeps bringing up JVM SecurityManager, or how granular Deno's permission system is, or a syntax for granting runtime permissions to modules (like your Agoric link). That's not what happened here. The actual attack in the article was a post-install script run by the package manager. That means whatever kind of limits you might place on runtime capabilities of the library wouldn't have mattered. You need a system that lets the package installer request granular permissions from the package manager, where the package manager runs the scripts in a sandbox and only explicitly-provided privileges are granted. I don't know of any package managers that support this feature today.