Before analog monitors got a builtin delay for changing the video mode, you could intentionally wreck the device by writing a few lines of code in QBasic, and by the time someone had already power cycled the poor machine while troubleshooting, the evidence was long gone.
Analog monitors didn't get delay for the protection. It's been a side effect of auto-sync feature when monitor spends some time analyzing input sync signals to automatically adjust its timings.
