While I can understand your concern, I‘m technically speaking also just some rando in the internet. It’s likely a better solution to evaluate crates a somewhat independently from their authors and and bit more on the actual code, quality and number of other projects dependent on such a crate. Sometimes such crates from someone in the community are real gems.
These are certainly valid considerations, but I would like to point out that just because a project seems large on the outside that does not guarantee that it has enough maintainers. Most open source projects are still run by a single person. That is still mostly the case for diesel, but also applies to much larger projects like curl. So while it might feel like a „large“ project will protect you from such issues, that’s really no sufficient guarantee. The only way you could make sure to not run into such problems is by auditing all of your dependencies.