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The interesting part is, that the original was hosted on itch too. And he did not say, that he got the link on discord. He said he was browsing on itch. 

It is not merely a try my game problem. It is a malware is visibly hosted on itch problem - and too few people notice and report the scams, meaning, that there are "old" games hosted on itch that are malware.

There should be a warning message for all downloads here. I am serious. People should be made aware that itch does not in any way has even the slightest guarantee that the person uploading the game is the real developer and that the game is not malware or pirated or both. This psa is all good and well, but how many unique users did read this?

Oh, itch does remove things, and I guess many things are not even indexed to begin with, but there are things released without indexing as in the "classic" try my game scam and with all those scams, some of them do get indexed, suggesting a false security as new users do think that games are scrutinized by staff and are thoroughly scanned - and what else should they think?! Itch is not some shady message board. But unfortunately, whatever security measures there are, they get penetrated on a daily basis and it takes user's reports to take down malware after the fact.

The problem with indie games is, that many popular game engines and homebrew solutions tend to provoke warnings, plus games from amateurs are more easily forgiven to be buggy. So when something funny is happening, the first thing people think is not: oh, crap, that's malware. It is, oh well, amateur developer, can't be helped, I just try again. It is just that that youtuber described it. He noticed the scam only, after he got warning that his accounts were compromised. Despite having system warning messages and strange behaviour. Imagine how long it would have taken to realize it, if the scam would have included an actual game bundled with malware...

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They could at least give some "trusted" users the ability to quarantine games, to shorten the exposure from the start of a report to the time staff reads the report.

And they do not even have to tell those users nor trust them. If you make a report while being logged in, they know who made the report. They could easily have a running average statistic about the quality of those reports. There is subcategories for reports and a malware category was introduced, so even that can be sorted accordingly.

So even if that user has a crappy ratio of 1 false report in 5, I would rather have 4 malwares being quarantined immediatly and 1 legit game queued for staff inspection than all 5 being visible, despite a user noticing that there is suspicous activity.

Oh, and there are legit games in quarantine all the time. What is more important? Protecting the users that think itch is a respectable site that hosts no malware or protecting the few games that get reported in error from being quarantined for a few days, till the misunderstanding clears. It might be a bad experiecne for a new developer to be quarantined, but I believe the experience of being hacked is far worse.

The issues is as follows: too few users checking out games to begin with. The scammers face the same problem as all the indie devs. Getting people to download the project. So if real developers barely get some downloads let alone ratings or comments, the time bombs uploaded by the criminals have it equally hard. So reports on malware should be treated with that in mind. I saw a year old project where people openly talked about the scam being a scam, but none of those people apparantly found the report button at the bottom or bothered to report.