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And the perpetual underlying vague threat “if you get your modelines wrong you could destroy your monitor”. I suppose I started with XFree86 and switched to xorg whenever Gentoo did.

That was only for fixed frequency CRTs. They were rare even when CRT was pervasive. And, yes, you could (I did) break them feeding wrong frequencies.

Immediately did ctrl-f "modeline" and was pleasantly surprised

I remember having to write XF86Config by hand.

EDIT: of course there's an xkcd for that: https://xkcd.com/963