I accidentally untarred archive intended to be extracted in root directory, which among others included some files for /etc directory.
I went on to rm -rv ~/etc, but I quickly typed rm -rv /etc instead, and hit enter, while using a root account.
Could make one archive intended to be unpacked from /etc/ and one archive that’s intended to be unpacked from /home/Alice/ , that way they wouldn’t need to be root for the user bit, and there would never be an etc directory to delete. And if they run tar test (t) and pwd first, they could check the intended actions were correct before running the full tar. Some tools can be dangerous, so the user should be aware, and have safety measures.
they acquired a tar package from somewhere else. the instructions said to extract it to the root directory (because of its file structure). they accidentally extracted it to their home dir
that is how this happened. not anything like what you were saying