‘Bricked’ in this sense meaning not that you’d just trash your OS and need a reinstall, but that it could actually stop your computer from booting at all. So the system32 analogy doesn’t exactly fit.

It’s because some motherboards implement UEFI in a way that allows important variables to be overwritten by I/O processes. Executing sudo rm -rf /* would recursively go into the EFI parameters folder where the kernel mounts EFI variables and attempt to delete things. Some motherboards allowed these delete operations to remove things in the motherboard’s firmware it needs to complete POST, thus rendering the motherboard useless.

But that’s a problem with the motherboard, not with Linux or Windows. The same damage can be caused by Windows.

‘Brigading’ would be if pro-Linux communities were organizing to specifically target another community.

The fediverse is likely to attract the kinds of people interested in Linux in the first place, and all the negative attention that community attracts comes organically.

I talked with the user a bit in Linux_vs_Windows before they were booted from the community, and it’s my opinion that they just have a hate-boner going for Linux. It’s possible to have valid criticism of Linux, but they go way past legitimate and straight into obsession territory. They tend to post in that community daily. So their points aren’t exactly great (though sometimes they hit on a good meme) and they get the points they get naturally.

It’s not a conspiracy, their arguments just tend to be shit.