I Broke My MacBook User Profile by Deleting a Single Folder

I had a conversation with Apple support where they told me that the Chess program can not be deleted because it is needed for the Operating System to function properly. My first instinctive response was “today is not the April 1st, guys”, but apparently they weren’t joking.

If somebody told me this before I wouldn’t believe them, but here we go. Why would they do something like this?

I tried reproducing the issue in a macOS 12 Monterey Intel-based VM by deleting ~/Documents (it was automatically recreated on reboot) and deleting ~/Documents then creating a new symlink with the same name in the same directory (as the author did) to a directory outside of ~ (the symlink worked fine, even after rebooting).

...and running Synology Drive to sync

...and messing with symlinks resulting in a ~/.documents file (or folder)

oof, what a wild ride

being a settings tweaker myself I could see myself having done exactly that