Are you sure it was dot pitch and not dot clock?
Dot pitch on a crt might make the image look bad (trying to draw onto the shadow mask) but I doubt it would damage it.
Setting an invalid dot clock could damage some crts. But most of the modern (read from mid 90s on) would just go to the power save mode when they got a clock they couldn’t use. The warning did still remain on the xfree86 configuration guides though.
Showing my age perhaps.
I’d say the ideal situation is that tools are developed library first, then cli or gui as preferred allowing others to pick up the slack and make the other tool (or tools) using the functions in the library.
One of the reasons automation is so much easier on linux than windows is because there are many more cli tools to do things. On windows many tools are gui first and cannot easily be automated.