Can someone explain what this is / how it works to someone who has done a considerable amount of programming but lacks this kind of operating system level knowledge? I was under the impression that ‘sudo’ was baked into the entire system. Like ‘cd’ or ‘ps’. How exactly can you just swap out sudo? Does that involve swapping out chmod as well?
There's a capability baked into the entire system named 'setuid' which allows certain binaries run by a user to access things as if they were root.
For example, when a user changes their password using 'passwd' that executable gets special write access to the file containing hashes of all users' passwords. The system's security relies on passwd being coded carefully enough that it won't let one user change another user's password, no matter what input they give it.
sudo is "just" a setuid binary, which checks if the user is allowed to run things as root and if so uses its power to run them. It can be replaced.
There are a bunch of design implications resulting from the way setuid works - for example, the operating system has a special setting so if you plug in a USB drive containing a setuid binary, the setuid bit on it gets ignored. So you can't make a special version of sudo at home which doesn't check permissions, then take it to the school computer lab and have it work there.