Why would it matter? In my last job we had user home directories synced via puppet (I am overly simplifying this) which enabled any ops guy to have same set of shell and vim configuration settings on production machines too.

I daresay - having hostname as part of prompt saves lot of trouble.

Having the hostname on the prompt is a good idea, but I don't think it would have helped with this process failure.

I work at a company where we have hundreds of database machines. Running this kind of command _anywhere_ without some kind of plan would be foolish. (It's one of the reasons why we have a datastore team that handles database administration.)

But the same lesson applies to application servers as well. Don't run deleterious commands out of curiosity. Have a peer-reviewed roll plan to act on when doing things like this. A role plan would have called for verifying the host before running the command.

But even before that, the issue should have been investigated more!

All of these things contributed to the failure. There should ideally be better ownership through dedicated roles, peer-reviewed processes for dangerous activities, and a better process for investigation that does not involve deleting things haphazardly.