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Other giveaways:

* "more or less 1535 customers"

* ansible would fail if variables are unset (though they could be empty)

* no mention of --no-preserve-root

* who mounts an off-site backup, instead of pushing with scp/curl/whatever

* googling his name does not dig up any company

If he mounted his backup media and wiped it, what makes you think he couldn't cockup the dd command?

However, under Linux rm -rf / needs --no-preserve-root to work, right?

Depends on which version of `rm` you have. Newer versions (rm from coreutils 8.xx I believe) use no-preserve-root

And the question is tagged centos 7, which is from 2014 - far too recent to not have --no-preserve-root.

It's distribution dependent.

Yes. To wit:

"I swapped if and of while doing dd. What to do now?" – Marco Marsala Apr 11 at 7:02