It often seems to be… ‘Gee Brian, that’s a great invention! I wonder how we can kill people with it’, the thought having germinated in a slurry of greed and self interest. (Apologies for the slightly jaundiced view of our betters and elders, it comes with age.)
Testdisk is great. I recently cleaned a drive with diskpart and after the initial 100bpm “oh shit, wrong drive” moment, I fixed the partition structure with testdisk. Took a while, but pretty simple and easy to use.