"the only thing that locking the root account gets you is assurance that if you ever bork the user you created in this guide (or sudo functionality as a whole)

"the only thing that locking the root account gets you is assurance that if you ever bork the user you created in this guide (or sudo functionality as a whole) you'll have no way to recover without booting into another environment." As a dev, I say that's a good thing. I've administered my own systems for decades and helped in small startups where we had no full time admin so definitely not new to administering Linux.