Using './*' would have avoided this in most shells because ordinary globbing excludes dotfiles, so .ssh and authorized_keys are not matched. In my experience scp is brittle for bulk syncs, so I run rsync -a --exclude='.ssh' --dry-run ./ user@host:~/target to verify before I commit the changes. I keep an out of band recovery path, like a temporary deploy key, a nonprivileged rescue user, or console access, as the only reliable way to avoid being locked out at 3AM.

Yes, since it would’ve copied the globbed files, rather than the current directory itself.