I'd say yes. According to their German Wikipedia entry, they support Sea Shepherd, environment and wildlife protection, and indigenous people in their fight against deforestation.
By the 'user running the web server' I mean the user running the Apache, Ngix or whatever web server on your system. Usually, afaIk, you should not be able to login as e.g. www-data on the system. You can identify the username by running ps -ef and searching for the web server process. You'll find the corresponding user name in the first column.
As far as I understand, the user server is not the user running your web server e.g. www-data, right? Otherwise I would advise against giving him elevated privileges such as sudo rights.
If the authentication of the user server has sufficiently high level, e.g. a strong password, SSH key authentication, I don't see a high risk in using the NOPASSWD method. But, as I am no expert, please take this with a grain of salt.
The solutions you've proposed definitely are more elegant and I'd prefer either of these over my quick and dirty solution.
The question is: How frequently is this needed?
If its on a regular basis, then the workaround using bind or selecting a different storage path are preferable. If it's needed even more frequently, setting up the Docker SFTP container is an acceptable extra work.
Please check the correct path to sudo and sftp-server.
However, you need to login via ssh and start a sudo session once before running the command. If someone has a solution to work around this, please feel welcome.
Having other 180° turnarounds in mind, e.g. Unity, which was nice on a netbook, or their display server (I don't recall its name), would it be that surprising if this was real news? This makes it a really good April Fool's joke.
The title states:
So OP uses the preconfigured "ready to go" solution with the supervisor doing the setup and upgrades. Which somehow is not succesfull in doing so.