I accidentally untarred archive intended to be extracted in root directory, which among others included some files for /etc directory.
I went on to rm -rv ~/etc, but I quickly typed rm -rv /etc instead, and hit enter, while using a root account.
The third party trash package works in places the GUI and the aforementioned GUI-related command line tools may not. I can't tell whether this is a bug in trash or in the system tools, TBH.
Might be a bug I've never experience this issue with the trash-cli tools.