Cars are mostly immune to such things.
Mostly due to previous experience which has showed that SW alone will not protect hardware.
So does a switch.
Someone installing gentoo on a cars ECU, and not implementing the feature to turn the fans on will easily overheat and destroy the car... the same is happening here with the lcd controller (and yes, the switch is designed so that the user can never go above some brightness level... unless the user hacks the switch and installs some random linux on it).
The car will alert the driver than something is wrong and should stop as soon as it is safe.
Because stopping engine abruptly in middle of highway could be very dangerous.
A lot of cars also have so-called "limp mode" where some failures cause car to limit engine power and other stuff, basically to get to the next point the car can be stopped and towed to shop
We're talking about someone taking a device, hacking it, installing some random software (whatever hacked version of linux runs on switch), and that software does not have the feature of limiting the max brightness at an accaptable (non-damaging level). So the same as if you took an ecu of a car, put linux on it, didn't implement the limp mode feature and then blame the hardware for overheating.