It expands and then immediately executes, at least in bash by default.

depends on your histverify setting for 'shopt' do a

shopt -s histverify

versus

shopt -u histverify

and then add whatever you prefer (-s probably) to your bashrc

For a personal system, that's fine. For the situation where you are a sysadmin and are jumping onto one of possibly hundreds of systems, I prefer not to rely on a behavior that is specifically made more safe (implying it is less safe as it exists by default) by active configuration. In that situation, it's much easier to just not use the less safe version in favor of the safer version if not too burdensome, and both exist.

...otoh, if you are a sysadmin managing possibly hundreds of systems, you shouldn't be 'jumping onto' any one of them at all these days ! You ought to be using fabric, chef, puppet, ansible ...etc ...Ha ha, only serious ;-)

Sure, those reduce the instances you'll need a shell on a box, but they can't eliminate them. Sometimes you just need to see what's going on on that box, run top, see why there's a few thousand messages in the mail spool ad coax them through, figure out why SQL isn't responding or keeps dying, etc, etc.