In my career, it has already happened more than once. And definitely not deliberately.

There are many ways this can happen accidentally. You could be trying to checkout a branch and tab complete your way into a folder name instead. You could be typing alt/esc + . with the intent of getting last argument of previous bash command, keyboard glitches and you end up with . instead.

Just because it hasn’t happened to you yet, you shouldn’t discount the experience of others. That’s like saying you have never messed up dd yet, so there are no problems with dd’s design.