Just recently stumbled on this issue. Symptoms- despite having admin or root privileges, you can’t delete a user account in System Preferences/ Users & Groups.

According to this-

https://medium.com/@ambroselittle/cant-delete-original-admin-user-on-macos-high-sierra-1d79fb438246

and this

https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/376113/catalina-ask-password-to-delete-user-but-password-is-always-wrong

It’s a hangover from ‘ye olden days’ and requires quite a lot of complex manoeuvres to fix.

Well, I got lazy and did this bit-

  1. System Preferences > Login Options > Join… > Open Directory Utility…
  2. Click to unlock it
  3. Go to Directory Editor. Search to find the user you can’t delete
  4. Find the GeneratedUID field on the right and copy it somewhere safe.
  5. Change one digit in it and Save

 

 

this is a system user, but you know what I mean…

 

At this point I diverged from the script and simply closed stuff and attempted to delete the recalcitrant user- and ye verily it was able to be deleted (took a while because it was a big account)

So I don’t claim to have done anything new, but simplified the instructions. This worked and the machine reboots fine, no issues detected…