Being able to do it only as root is the protection, so I am against any "uber-root" hurdles you're proposing.

<rant>
The problem is that people (especially Android users, but many people on TMO as well) don't realize what it means to do stuff as root. With the power comes a great responsibility and regular users should never play with root access.

Yet there's a lot of "yo yo, I just rooted my phone, just because I can" attitude.

Just look at the "SailfishOS pre-pre-release" threads where good amount of users goes through an unnecessary risk and then is surprised when something breaks. There were plans by Jolla last summer to introduce upgrades that would overwrite the system partition so you don't have to hop over updates every time after resetting your phone, but imagine what disaster it would be if they tried to do it and bunch of users went ahead with their

routine prematurely...
</rant>

There should be no "just by being root".