Despite what you've been told, rest assured that an OEM unlock will not, in and of itself, cause damage to your device. If you go to Settings, About Phone & tap Build Number 7 times, a hidden menu called Developer Options will appear. In this menu, you will find an option called OEM UNLOCKING. Enabling this feature makes you the option to manually unlock your bootloader. To reiterate, this does not unlock your bootloader but allows you to manually unlock it via a tethered command prompt if you so choose.
So, let's say you enabled OEM UNLOCKING and then manually unlocked your bootloader using a tethered fast boot mode command line. So now that your bootloader is unlocked, what changes? Well as far as your Android OS goes, nothing changes. Unlocking the bootloader removes a layer of protection that allows your /boot, /recovery, /system, /modem & other partitions to be flashed. This is not rooting and not the same as rooting. Therefore, an unlocked bootloader does not alter your /system partition or your Android OS directly, as others have erroneously stated. But, you can now flash your device with a custom recovery which will allow you to install a custom ROM, a custom kernel or flash a root script to your stock Android OS, among many other things. Bootloader unlocking & rooting are two separate & distinct procedures and the two are not dependent on one another. In other words, you can fully root a device with a locked bootloader, just as you can have an unlocked bootloader and have a non-rooted device. Of course, to have full customization options, rooting and bootloader unlocking are preferred.
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