TIL. Thanks for your input into how sudo might not be super secure on systems already dribbling with malware.

You're making a big assumption about how other people use their computers. If you're running mostly desktop applications on Linux, you wouldn't use sudo much either. And if anything, I use sudoish-to-actual-rootlike on Windows more than on Linux, because more things are gated behind elevated privileges (some papered over by default UAC settings, but only when manipulated through built-in GUI tools) and there's nothing as simple as Distrobox and rootless Podman to set up isolated non-root environments.