It is real, typically happening when dumber models (haven't personally seen any of the SOTA ones on reasonable thinking/reasoning level do this) try to clean up stuff via bash and forget to assign a variable. Things like "rm -rf sessions/$id" without double-checking $id is actually defined, would do "rm -rf sessions/" and remove the entire directory. Add in more variables in a path like "rm -rf $HOME/projects/$user/$repo/$tmpdir" and the dumb models people think they can use for local coding, promptly removes a lot more than expected.
Not sure how people aren't already running these agents in an environment/sandbox where stuff like this wouldn't matter, locally or not, but some LLMs do truly accidentally delete stuff for people, without "prompt poisoning", I had it happen myself while testing Qwen3.8-27B (BF16) locally just a week or two ago, exactly as described above.