You're good to keep your skepticism. If you trust them, the ones creating the tutorial to have vetted to a degree, or that a very popular package like that is vetted to a reasonable degree, you'll just go ahead with it. (Like most people do without questioning it.)

You'll need considerable experience and insight to do good, reasonable risk assessment. Without that, you can either trust and hope in others, or skip the ecosystem and look for alternative technologies.

It's also worth noting that your potential impact is considerable lower if you're only doing local test and development work, not publishing or publicly serving anything. I'm not personally familiar if or to what degree running arbitrary local commands has been limited in the npm ecosystem by now.