Apologies, I thought the distinction here was clear. I don't think it's useful in protecting against people with the intent to break stuff. A malicious person

Apologies, I thought the distinction here was clear. I don't think it's useful in protecting against people with the intent to break stuff. A malicious person doesn't necessarily need root to do damage, and if they do, then there are many vectors for obtaining elevated privileges from within a shell. I do think that it's useful for keeping users from within your organization from doing damage by accident. Like, you could enabled a person to log in and restart a service, but prevent them from mucking around with configurations.