There's nothing special about the name root, it's just a convention that it maps to uid 0. You can change it to something else and then rename an account with a uid != 0 to root. Whether this breaks anything is largely distribution dependant.
Whether or not that would result in the check being changed to see if "root" is uid 0 is another step in an arms race. Because with containerization or virtualization you can run as root with much more acceptable levels of risk than usual.
You're already running the code locally, unless you're in an incredibly hardened environment it is going to make precisely zero difference whether you run it as root or not.
