Yes, you both did. To a user losing / is just as bad as losing ~, because ~ is all she cares about, not her OS settings, hence why I think the idea that running as root is worse than running as an unprivileged user is silly in this context.

They are effectively the same: an unknown script executing "rm -rf ~" with an unprivileged user is going to cause as much grief as root running "rm -rf /".

I couldn't care less that the system is still up if all my data is gone.

Also, I believe “rm -r” traverses mount points.