[PebblesHD]

In a similar flavour, on older versions of Mac OSX, you could touch an initial setup file and reboot which would start the out of box experience and let you make a new admin user if you ever found yourself locked out of one for some reason. Modern disk encryption put an obvious stop to that…

[TheNewsIsHere]

The old /var/db/.AppleSetupDone trick. At least as of 2-3 years ago this still worked. I _think_ they've renamed the file since; I haven't used this in a long time. If I recall correctly that file became SIP protected so had to disable SIP to delete/create it.

Even with FileVault2/FDE, it was still possible as long as you could unlock the drive. Now being able to authenticate as an administrator privileged user is (in some scenarios) a direct proxy for demonstrating ownership to recoveryOS, blocking access to the Utilities menu. It's a clever strategy from a security perspective.

Mixed, mostly past, tense because I'm not sure if this still works in 2024.