this is not new, this is everyday life with helping hands, on duty engineers, l2-l3 levels telling people with physical access which commands to run etc. etc. etc.
The places I've seen this at had specific verification codes for this. One had a simple static code per person that the hands-on guys looked up in a physical binder on their desk. Very disaster proof.
The other ones had a system on the internal network in which they looked you up, called back on your company phone and asked for a passphrase the system showed them. Probably more secure but requires those systems to be working.
This is not a real datacenter case but normal social hacking. On the datacenter side you have many more security checks plus many of the times the helping hands and engineers are part of the same company, using internal communication tools etc. so they are on the same logical footprint anyhow
