Raspbian is sometimes a compromise between security and usability, because it is designed to go into the hands of new users. It also used to ship with a default “pi/rasberry” login hardcoded and IIRC permitted root password login over ssh. Things experience users change or turn off, but needs to start friendly for the rest, you know?

By doing this, they can take a step in the right direction by separating the root and login user, without becoming annoying asking for a password frequently as a newbie copies and pastes tutorial commands all week.

And as I said it’s unlikely, even very unlikely, but just not impossible. Everything comes with a risk, I just believe it’s up to you, not me, what risks mean in your environment. Might be you’d like to have the convenience on the home dev server, but rather have as much security as possible on a public facing one.

Or maybe you’d like to get really dialed in and only allow specific commands to be run without a password, so you can be quick and convenient about rebooting but lock down the rest. Up to you, really, that’s the power of Linux.