alt Hacker NewsThe kinds of things that you list that an attacker could do with root access don't sound like things that an actual attacker would want if they are infiltrating random people's personal computers for their own gain. Modifying the kernel or arbitrary programs is so far beyond what typical malware tries to do that I think it seems kind of silly to consider those things when evaluating the security of an operating system designed for personal computers.
To me, they do sound like the kind of things an attacker would want, if they found a reliable, reproducible, automatable path to them. If I was writing malware, ransomware, or just exfiltrating data, I'd be much happier to have root access to do it. Even simple botnets, I'd probably want to try to replace a regular service that most everybody runs (like cupsd) with one that functions exactly like the real one, but also does the malicious activity, and similarly try to patch the package manager to persist it on updates.