If I understood the article correctly, this can be exploited remotely by anybody who has managed to get a shell on the system.
Most OSX boxes are probably single user devices. But you do not normally run as root/wheel, you need sudo (sometimes through a nice GUI) for software to get root privs.
It's not 'somebody' as if another person were logged into their own account. It's that malware running as you can now get root, to further compromise your system, without needing a sudo password.
You still need to find a way to execute code on the target system (also called "getting a shell"), but this can be done over the wire, too.