When is it ever a good idea to run rm -rf?

Forgive me if this is the wrong subreddit to ask the question, but I'm not sure who else to ask. If I should ask a different place, please let me know who.

Let me introduce myself. I am an MIS major in college currently and also work as a lab technician in the school's computer lab, so not actually a sysadmin. I follow this subreddit so that I can (somewhat) learn a few things before I actually need to know them. I will be taking a UNIX class next semester so hopefully I will learn more about this, but until then, I will have to ask for help.

According to this article, a man supposedly ruined his entire company by running a Bash command at the wrong time in the wrong place. If I understand properly,

rm -rf

will delete everything in the folder it is directed to. So why would you want to run it? What would be a plausible situation or running that command?

I'm not trying to ridicule the man or anyone else. I legitimately just want to know what the appropriate time to run that particular command would be.

Again, if I'm posting in the wrong place, I'm sorry. Just let me know and I'll move my post elsewhere.