The gist is this:

• I was using a terminal file manager called nnn
• You can make bulk selections in it using the space key
• However, unlike a graphical file manager, selections across directories persist. Like if you select some things in dir1, then traverse to dir1/.. and select stuff there, the selections in dir1 will persist. In hindsight this sounds like an antifeature.
• Due to frantic key presses I accidentally traversed to /home and selected /home/name
• Then I traversed to the actual directory where I wanted to make the selections, did that and deleted the selections
• It was unknown to me that /home/name was also selected
• nnn just executes shell commands to perform deletions. In my shell profile rm is aliased to rm -iv so the output conveyed to me what was going on (my home directory was being nuked)
• I ctrl+c’d the operation and restored my $HOME from the snapshot

I’ve done it, more than once. There are infinitely many ways to do it. I use trash-cli instead of rm(1) now.