I'm an engineer, I have worked in the IT industry, the electronic repair industry and the electronic manufacturing industry and never ever have I worked on a fully working item, device or product so I can satisfy my 'curiosity'.
As for your defence of the OP's son, i completely disagree with you. The machine was fully working. Going into recovery mode is not the habit of a curious mind. If the machine was faulty to some degree then yes, being a curious mind as to how recovery mode works is plausible but to do so on a fully working machine, that's not curiosity, that's just plane malicious behaviour in my opinion.
Perhaps I should clarify - "curiosity" is, IMO, a crucial part of learning and education, and my own experience was that I experimented with computers and electronics from a young age because I wanted to know how stuff works and would take it apart (software included) - and sometimes break stuff in the process. If you never risk touching stuff (that you can afford to break), then you are missing out on learning opportunities.
I am not talking about screwing around with someone else's production system or hardware. Sure, we try to do things non-destructively, or at least to minimise their impact, which is why we have development sandboxes or VMs that are "disposable" and can easily be re-created.
As for the OP's son, it sounds like you have either never been a teenager, or haven't had children recently. Why would the son be "malicious" if he screwed up his father's computer? He may, like many teenagers, have thought he knew what he was doing or was just careless, and either didn't realise what he had done or was embarrassed to own-up to the error. We don't know, so it's a bit of stretch to assume there was bad intent. Maybe there was? Perhaps his dad had grounded him or it was revenge? We don't know... Young people do all sorts of crazy stuff thinking they're on top of it. Otherwise we wouldn't have tragedies like car accidents and drug-overdoses, or doing dangerous stuff on TikTok videos.
