This is not a common programming mistake to make at all, I'd also say it has everything to do about being invasive. The EVE reference you mentioned was 9 years ago for a video game in an early release stage.
I don't know the exact nature of the Adobe bug, but Steam had a similar problem recently too "Moved ~/.local/share/steam. Ran steam. It deleted everything on system owned by user" https://github.com/valvesoftware/steam-for-linux/issues/3671
Honestly (and imnsho) the prevalence of that sort of thing makes it even less excusable for a large company like Adobe.
EVE wasn't early release stage at that point. But: EVE at the time had a startup configuration file `boot.ini` inside the game folder. They tried to delete a game file, but if the game was not installed on C:\, a couple of path variables were empty and it realpathed to `C:\boot.ini`, if I remember correctly.
I really hope they don't change, I love the simplistic design and never having to worry about major layout changes is great. The downside, their massive legal team has a larger budget.
Even the small layout changes Reddit has done the past few years has started to drive me away.