I accidentally untarred archive intended to be extracted in root directory, which among others included some files for /etc directory.
I went on to rm -rv ~/etc, but I quickly typed rm -rv /etc instead, and hit enter, while using a root account.
I think they just mean you’d be prompted for a password, which should give you pause if you’re supposed to be deleting items in your home folder.
If you use sudo for each privileged command you wouldn’t typically use sudo to remove something in your home directory, so the command would fail. At which point you’d check why the command failed.