> Or if it's a bunch of bare metal machines, hopefully someone old-school in the organization thought to deploy 48/96-port rs232 console serial concentrators and wire them up to the db9 serial port on each physical server. And you didn't disable all local serial tty in your operating config.

In a hacker folklore story this would 100% be the solution. And for some reason they'd have to use an original VT100 that some greybeard had lovingly restored at home.