That's concerning of course and I'm also happy the vulnerabilities have been discovered and resolved.

Love them or hate them, CocoaPods are still essential when building apps for Apple platforms. There are entire ecosystems like Kotlin Multiplatform, Flutter and others that depend on cocoapods. Many good (but old) libraries are only available as pods (some still in objective-c or even c++).

CocoaPods also offer features which are difficult or even impossible with Swift Packages especially for distributing more complex binaries and frameworks. And not to mention the britle tooling around Swift Packages, slower build times etc. SPM is not bad but it needs more time and attention to mature before it's ready to fully take over.