The man page says that sudo allows a permitted user to execute a command as the superuser or another user, as specified by the security policy. However most of the sudo use that I've seen/done is really a privilege escalation with switched user being just a consequence of that. Even the famous XKCD 🥪 webcomic shows sudo being used in this way. Most of the time this small difference does not really matter, but sometimes it's really inconvenient.

This is mostly a note I've written for my self so that I can quickly recall how to sudo when I really only want to do something without the su part. Let's have a look at another less popular but sometimes quite a bit more appropriate option.