As the owner of the various Microsoft trademark [squatting packages], I’m obviously in favour of squatting for those purposes (we had to use lawyers to get a couple of the names). Being able to explain why a name is unavailable is very useful.
There are quite a few packages that have typosquatted themselves this way, e.g. piptools (which I just happened to run into last night).
It would be nice to be able to register the name and description without a real package, and possibly even add a friendly error to send back to installers requesting the package, but otherwise I’m quite happy with this approach.