The proviso could have been read either way, and your claim that it's an exact equivalent of shipping off a developer laptop makes no sense if what you meant was "you're downloading untrusted code from strangers". I read it first the way you apparently meant it but chose to respond to the meaning that made your second sentence make sense rather than the one that made it a non sequitur.
Using images from untrusted sources is a not-quite-exact equivalent of downloading code directly from npm and shipping it off to production.