What I read was many users claimed about report error ”set the root password" and developers will try to fix this “report error”:
https://blog.linuxmint.com/?p=3853
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I always thought that sudo and root was the same person. 
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sudo will give the user root terminal privilege. sudo su in a terminal and your password will log you into the root account.
i think that was how i saw things before i installed debian and had to add my user to the sudoers file so i could run apt update like i was used to doing in bodhi. it seems to me ubuntu and mint (and probably others) have taken care of that layer of security for the user by adding them to the sudo group (you can run groups username to check your own) when they are created.
the tail end of my sudoers file (you can see yours with sudo visudo. ctrl + x closes nano without writing or changing anything) in mint looks like this:
so instead of having to add our user, we can rely on the group permissions.
man sudo_root has a good explanation about how root is different from the administrative commands we are allowed to use by using sudo.
INTRODUCTION
By default, the password for the user “root” (the system administrator)
is locked. This means you cannot login as root or use su. Instead, the
installer will set up sudo to allow the user that is created during
install to run all administrative commands.
my take on what i read in the blog post that @Tech_JA linked was that they were trying to find a way to word the root user password set request so that users in general would understand there was a security concern without having to explain or go into all of the above.
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