neatchee

they acquired a tar package from somewhere else. the instructions said to extract it to the root directory (because of its file structure). they accidentally extracted it to their home dir

that is how this happened. not anything like what you were saying

except if you read the accompanying text they already started the issue by accidentally unpacking an archive to their user directory that was intended for the root directory. that’s how they got an etc dir in their user directory in the first place