It’s a LOCAL privilege escalation vulnerability. You need sufficient access to be able to execute arbitrary code locally on the machine. You would need a remote code execution vulnerability in an exposed service (VPN, web server, game server and so on) before an attacker could chain to this to get remote root on your system.

Certainly. I don’t discount that any exploit is ‘really bad’. I like my OS of choice to be as free of exploits as it can possibly be. However, some of the material I was reading involved areas of Linux that I have little if any knowledge of value with, so I thought I’d as the question.