Yes, one can quite simply nuke the root partition, reinstall the system on it, and if they choose the same location for the user home, they'll also find the old user configurations ready.

User configurations are only half of the total (with the method above, the system configurations are lost), however, it's considerably less work to do.

This doesn't only apply to system corruption scenarios - upgrades also can use the same workflow (of course, the compatibility of the configuration files with new package versions is a separate matter).

I don't know about pros, but I do that. Sometimes you don't want to waste time figuring it out, and you were thinking about upgrading or switching distros anyway.

I think the point though was, "Why are people doing this if reinstalling the OS so so much less a thing in Linux land?"

I like btrfs. It's made subvolumes (/ and /home) and snapshots (which I religiously take before any major updates) ridiculously easy.

You might really enjoy Solaris's boot environments, then ;-)

This is true, I backups for all my stuff and have scripts that auto configures my system according to my backed up configs.