Yes. The switchdev "sw1p[0-9]+" ports are special; the any data the software kernel injects to them is discarded and they never emit packets to the kernel. They exist only to allow you to use `ip bridge` and `ip route` on them. So if you accidentally configure software switching on these ports no data will flow -- it will be totally obvious. You might get "no packets" by accident but you will never get "software switching" by accident.

If you really want software switching you have to use the management port (there's only one or two of these) whose name is "eth0" or "eth1" or something like that. So avoiding "accidental software switching" is really easy -- if you're typing "eth" you're doing it wrong. You can even explicitly delete this interface if you don't need the CPU to be able to snoop/inject traffic to/from the switch ports.

It really depends on how much you know what you are doing, If you stick to:

*) IP Routing that would normally "fit" in a vendor switch

*) Bridging

*) VRFs

You will be fine

If you try and do some weird stuff then it's best to check with "ip route" to see if it was actually installed into hardware or not, but I would simply not do anything weird on such hardware