The 90’s was a wild time…
Specially for people coming from windows, this was normal. The appeal of mandrake and corel and suse was this kind of graphical control panel à la windows where you needed root privileges in a graphical interface.
I myself didn’t learn about sudo until years later, and su just from debian 3.0.
If you’re not born on January 1st, 1970, you’re not a true John Doe.