Sure. But the simplicity of adding a wildcard makes it very easy for sysadmins to make a too simplistic configuration, which in turn ends up being a security vu

Sure. But the simplicity of adding a wildcard makes it very easy for sysadmins to make a too simplistic configuration, which in turn ends up being a security vulnerability, maybe even if the code in sudo itself contains no faults. To me this sounds like a feature for a non-default "root-manager", while the default should be kept simpler to avoid people falling into such traps.