These people are running open loop.
As one of my (few decent) professors once said: if a pole moves into the right half-plane, something will happen to move it into the left-half plane, and that something may be outside the system itself.
The engineers out there will understand this (some may remember it).
110 psi through 500 ft of 2 1/2” hose
Exactly. The amplifier is burning up!........................
Snicker
Yep, an unstable linear system will go non-linear and limit.
I’m thinking more red-guards here than complex plane stability. What happened in China? The Red Guards eventually burned themselves out and were viewed by later generations as a big mistake.