Yes terrible move which will lead to much confusion and consternation in the future.
But honestly I'm most amazed by the fact that there wasn't previously a way to run commands with elevated permissions in Windows. How did people work like that? Just run everything in an admin terminal super unsafely?
As a self-identified linux engineer who, despite tremendous efforts to avoid it, has somehow managed to still spend about half my career having to care about windows in some way... the answer to "how do you do [thing] on windows sanely?" is generally "it is simply done insanely instead."
Am I biased? Haha yes, I have a signed copy of Free Software, Free Society. But also I have spent years caring about products that do need to work on windows. And my professional take is "there is always a way to do it, but it is very seldom pretty." (And my take for linux is "there is always a way to do it, often more than one, and at least one of them is going to be pretty, but which one is the pretty one will depend greatly on who you are and what you're doing").
There is runas to run as a different user. And if you want to run as the same user but elevated, there has been third-party software like gsudo [1]. But yeah, the recommended way to do it was to just open an elevated terminal, run the one admin command you need there and close it again. Not a huge deal if all you want to do is run a choco install command or something; and generally you don't switch so much back-and-forth between needing admin and not needing it.
You have to think about what terminal you need before opening it. I rarely need an admin terminal. That software is often installed by downloading and double click helps as that cuts out the command line. Devops is tricky though! You sometimes have to spawn other processes to get the elevated permissions.
I guess the reason it strikes me as strange is, on linux the usage of `sudo` helps you understand which operations might be dangerous in a fine-grained way
So like if you are executing a series of commands, the one requiring admin privileges tends to be one you might want to be more careful about (i.e. altering system configs, or doing a potentially insecure operation)
So if you are running everything in an admin terminal, it seems like you wouldn't have that extra check to remind you to be extra mindful of a particular operation, since everything you do in that terminal is in the same bucket
I think generally people rather treat everything they do in the admin terminal as dangerous, and do everything else in another terminal or in the GUI. The typical windows admin experience happens on a GUI, even when remoting in, so the idea of using multiple windows for multiple things is more natural than in the SSH experience typical in the linux world
Another commenter in a different thread mentioned wsudo could be a better name and I was thinking the same.
It doesn't really bother me personally either way, but I understand peoples' concern. I didn't mind the wget and curl aliases. I find myself autopilot typing 'ls' in PS quite often and I'm glad they aliased it to 'dir'.
As a regular Windows, Linux (via WSL), and macOS user, I'm not confused by the curl/wget alias in Powershell, and I appreciate it. I understand from context that it's not actually curl and has different options. It's much easier than remembering whatever Invoke-HyperText-Transfer-Protocol-Request -Url incantation that's native to Powershell.
* https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-tech&m=170742832804260&w=2
* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39309638