I did this once by accident (bad scripting, managed to abort it,) it wasn’t too bad until sudo told me that the sudoers file had the wrong owner. I then learnt that there are other ways to become root.
OS ran for another ~6months after I re chowned etc to root.
Some commercial waste disposal does sorting of recycling out of the waste, they will even ask for it to not be separated prior so that they don’t have to transport it separately.
This is typically why you see this.
Whether that is a better way of doing it I don’t know.