[rtpg]

"ensure authorization" and "raise privileges" and "call exec" are all behind plugin-based architectures to allow for people to set up various ways to do things. The simple example: why do you only need to type in the password once per session/30 minutes calling sudo in most environments? How can people set things up with a hardware key? How do you make just some commands work and not others?

That being said I don't think sudo's code is complicated? It's big because it has all of these plugins supporting various mechanisms, but each file is pretty straightforward, and the control flow is really not that hard (after you get that it's plugins).