Hmm…
Pretty much what we’ve known for a very long time now. The days of power output amps dying when a tiny bit of return fried them is long gone. Clearly having the best VSWR you can get is good practice and maximises your output, but chasing 1:1 is (and has always been) pretty pointless. Note in the video how even with his dummy load, the meter itself changes the VSWR - it goes up and down a tiny bit just by the bending of the short length of cable.
I work in two different worlds - RF and AF. We get the “I just transmitted without my antenna connected - is the radio destroyed” questions, and usually then just say, “Is it working now?” and always get the answer “well, … yes” but in the audio world we get “I just connected a dynamic mic to my interface and forgot to turn off the phantom power - is my mic damaged?” Same answer - of course it’s still working.
It’s a bit sad this guy even had to make the video - and nice to see him ‘risk’ the radio. I’ve never done that test for 3 minutes, almost hoping it died - but the fact it didn’t is just the video we need to refer people to when they’re newcomers and at the lowest level of knowledge the exam requires.
I’m thinking of a nice test of a ribbon microphone - which according to internet lore will die if phantom power is connected to it. I could take the covers off, expose the ribbon and apply the power and show them absolutely nothing happens. It’s like this example, the science says it couldemphasized text**damage the device, but actually doesn’t because the design prevents it.