A pentest lab on Apple Silicon (and what a frontend dev did with root)

In the first post of this series I said the lab and the language came next: how to build a sealed environment where you can break things freely. This is the lab. I built it, ran a full engagement through it against a deliberately vulnerable target, took the box to root two different ways, and wrote the whole thing up as a guide anyone on an Apple Silicon Mac can follow. Then, because old habits die hard, I defaced the server with a pure-CSS animation. More on that at the end.