How is that comparable? Running everything as root is a) asking for accidents; b) a different class of problem.

You still want to run as a regular non-root user, possibly different users. The key difference to the mainstream use case is that you're looking to minimise the impact of bugs and failures, rather than manage security and combat malicious actors/code.

For this particular use-case, you might well consider that you don't need to patch for meltdown and spectre given the perceived risk/performance tradeoff for the current patches.