Sure, it's annoying and pedantic to nitpick someone's helpful answers and snippets. But sometimes the goal is to foster a better understanding, and reduce superstition and cargo-culting.

"sync<CR>sync<CR>sync<CR>reboot<CR>" became an idiom for various reasons. Then it became "sync; sync; sync; reboot" and deemed equivalent, which was missing the point that physically pressing "enter" introduced some human-length pauses into the process. Then "reboot(8)" incorporated those syncs, and "shutdown(8)" provided more flexibility, but the idiom persisted.

And to this day, the tier-1 support script says to clear your cookies and cache, try a different browser, factory reset your phone, disable firewall, disable AV, reboot your router, bypass your switch and plug in one device directly, wait 15 minutes and try again, and we've abandoned all attempts to understand, diagnose, or find root causes when the underlying systems are too diverse and complex to understand or keep your tech's expertise up-to-date.

'sudo su' is pure absurd but then how name naming it a "golf" ?? :)))

So maybe Perl is not so write-only after all ? ;)

I am not sure how passwords are relevant to the pointless chaining of two distinct commands, rather than invoking a straightforward "sudo -s".

People writing "sudo su" are simply imitating a common StackExchange idiom without knowing why.

"su" requires passwords unless invoked by root. "sudo" may be configured to permit/deny specific commands. So if you write that, then you're saying 'become root via the sudoers(5) config and then fork, exec, become root again via the setuid binary "su", in order to run an interactive shell.'

It's a poor habit to be promoting, because it assumes things about the configuration and suggests that "su" is equal to other particular "sudo" maintenance commands, when the point is simply to drop into a root shell, which is a facility provided directly by "sudo", if you'd only read the manual page and learn its options.

Nothing will stop you from invoking "sudo -s" without a password, without another fork/exec, without another suid utility carrying a significantly different authentication model.