This scirpt is ran by the systemd service.
In Fedora the service has priviledges dropped to the mysql user.
Thus "chown 0" will always fail

Never parse 'ls' output!
http://mywiki.wooledge.org/BashFAQ/087

--- mariadb-10.4.6/scripts/mysql_install_db.sh	2019-06-18 00:00:32.000000000 +0200
+++ mariadb-10.4.6/scripts/mysql_install_db.sh_patched	2019-06-20 01:41:43.250208187 +0200
@@ -476,12 +476,15 @@ then
   fi
   if test -z "$srcdir"
   then
-    chown 0 "$pamtooldir/auth_pam_tool_dir/auth_pam_tool"
-    if test $? -ne 0
+    if [ `stat "$pamtooldir/auth_pam_tool_dir/auth_pam_tool" -c %u` -ne 0 ]
     then
-        echo "Couldn't set an owner to '$pamtooldir/auth_pam_tool_dir/auth_pam_tool'."
-        echo " It must be root, the PAM authentication plugin doesn't work otherwise.."
-        echo
+      chown 0 "$pamtooldir/auth_pam_tool_dir/auth_pam_tool"
+      if test $? -ne 0
+      then
+          echo "Couldn't set an owner to '$pamtooldir/auth_pam_tool_dir/auth_pam_tool'."
+          echo " It must be root, the PAM authentication plugin doesn't work otherwise.."
+          echo
+      fi
     fi
   fi
   args="$args --user=$user"