You seem fairly shocked by something that implemented in another manner would prove to be a rather ineffective security measure.

1. If you have openSSH installed on your phone you can access the phone's terminal using puTTY from a Windows PC.
2. If you've set up something such as RescueOS you can probably dump mtd1 from it

Not having a security lock-screen that can be bypassed without resetting user information would just be a terrible solution, you shouldn't be impressed by this.

This is a bit like arguing that after encrypting a drive and forgetting the password the only way at it is erasing it... I know that your phone isn't encrypted and the concept isn't the same, but another solution would just be wrong.