Fun fact:

rm -rf / requires —no-preserve-root to work whereas rm -rf /* doesn’t.

That’s because the /* gets expanded by the shell before the command runs and it only sees the request to delete /var, /dev, /home, /usr,… recursively but not / specifically.

On another note: This line in the code doesn’t run through a shell and thus this won’t work and it just tries to delete the literal path of /* recursively - and thus fails to do any damage…