Alias rm to a flag that makes you affirm. On my phone, can’t be bothered to look at a man page.

Not a perfection solution, but one idea might be to use a rework of rm that places deleted files into a "trashbin"(just throws them into the tmp folder), so you can at least easily undo deletes
https://github.com/nivekuil/rip

you could also make an alias for rm that just move things to the trash bin thingy

This is really user error, but if you want to be insane instead of using a proper workflow to prevent things like this: https://www.howtogeek.com/790679/how-to-use-the-chattr-command-on-linux/

Are you running on btrfs? If not, why not? If so, install snapper and grub-snap or refind-btrfs, or whatever, and go wild.

Sounds like you might also be missing backups, but snapper you can have run every 10 minutes at almost no overhead. Then it won't matter if you delete something; you can always grab it out of a snapshot.

Daily backups. Then you can have as much wild ambition as you like. Disk failures do not care for your permissions bits anyway.

Practically though, one thing I find that's a good habit to get into is to use rmdir on directories that you know should be empty instead of rm -rf. If you've made a mistake and try to delete the wrong folder, it'll error out.

alias rm=trash-cli or shelltrash or something.

These days if the file is write protected, you get prompted for whether you really want to remove it. I don't know when that change appeared or whether it's universal.