I'm trying to understand the technical arguments/security implications between ssh'ing with root directly, or making an auxiliary sudo user in the context of maintaining a server. To clarify, we're talking about servers owned by a single admin. For multiple people working on the machine, it's obvious that there is the audit trail benefit of having unique users for each actual person and fine-grained permissions.
My thought is, if this is a desktop station, it makes sense and is recommended to use a non-root user for daily stuff, but on a server, you usually login to maintain it and 99% of the times all your activities require root permissions.
So is there any security benefits in creating a "proxy" user that you're going to sudo to root anyways, instead of directly providing ssh access to root?
The only benefit I can think of is security through obscurity i.e. bots would normally try to probe for "root" user. But from how I see it, if a sudoers' user gets compromised, it's the same as compromising the root user, so game over.
In addition, most remote administration frameworks, NAS systems, hypervisors, encourage usage of a root user for web login.