> There is an actual third party involved in this explicit review step. With flatpak the developer has a direct route to the user without any intermediary or checks.

I think your reading of the author's argument is correct. To that I would counter that you can have just the same with Flatpak, it just depends on the Repository you are pulling your packages from.

It would be awesome if Flathub were to offer some kind of process to validate the packaged applications.