I smell a bit of a rat around the "physical damage" from uncontrolled power on.
While it is painfully true that individual pieces of equipment may fail on power up if they were marginal the idea that switching off counting to 20 and switching on would cause widespread physical damage just does not pass the sniff test.
If it did very poorly designed, marginal and fragile internal power distribution would be indicated.
Worst case should just be some tripped breakers if the startup surge was greater than capacity.
One sees that occasional on utility service outages where a line transformer will pop it's fuse when the service is restored and the whole blocks refrigerators try to start at once.
This does not cause a damaging surge and is typically resolved with a new fuse.