Sometimes people run rm -rf / just for fun before reformatting a system, just to see what happens. Given that its purpose in life is to delete files, it stands to reason that running this command on a system which contains no important data is OK. A default configuration which makes this command destroy hardware is not reasonable.
rm -rf / probably doesn't do what you think it does. The coreutils version of rm includes --preserve-root[1], which is the default[2].
It also supports --one-file-system, which would prevent this and a host of other problems as well. That said, I don't really see a problem with Lennart's response. It's basically, "we should take steps to make this hard to do, but root is capable of doing anything, so don't expect it to be foolproof."
Is there some response besides the one linked here? Because all I see here is basically saying, "We're not going to change anything, this is not a problem, remount it yourself if you don't like it."
He says "The ability to hose a system is certainly reason enought to make sure it's well protected and only writable to root." That looks like agreement that it needs something done to me. I took the followup comment to be a useful to on how to mitigate the problem until then.
Isn't it already only writeable by root? The request is to make it not even writeable by root without taking some additional action to make it writeable first. If I understand correctly, that bit you quote just describes the current situation.
I take the and in his reply to infer he agrees something additional should be done. Whether his ultimate response for how to do that is adequate is unknown, since he didn't really elaborate on exactly what he thinks should be done. It could be he meant that to signify agreement with the suggested course of action in addition to agreement that there's a problem to be fixed.
In any case, the only thing clear to me from his statements is that he agreed that there was a problem in need of attention, which makes the response here somewhat baffling to me (although not as baffling as it should be. It's fairly easy to see how a lot of the animosity comes from feeling about systemd in general and Lennart in particular, especially since some people state as much, as if that has any bearing on his response in this instance).
There are a variety of ways root can hose a system and many are recoverable without replacing hardware. Hard bricking a motherboard is a whole different league.
