Not quite...I have ran without a resistor for many thousands of miles without harm. Tho, I have had a coil leak on me and caused it to overheat. Will a stock setup last longer? Probably. But this isn’t a stock engine, either. It needs a hotter spark. The coil is also mounted on top of the intake and soaks a lot of heat, it’s best bolted to the fender away from the engine and allow some airflow around it. IMO, running a basic electronic ignition to include MSD and mechanical advance is so old fashioned that it may as well be breaker points. For the price of a new distributor and an msd box and coil, you could run a stand-alone ignition system with compete control over ignition timing events and never rely on mechanical or vacuum advance, probably for a cheaper price.
For example, I run megasquirt. Which was designed for fuel injection but also controls spark. They sell kits that can run spark only. You can set any level of spark advance, rev limit, cold eng advance, dwell, hot eng timing retard, knock sensors, nitrous/boost timing retard, spark cut if you overspeed the eng - lots of options. I use a Bosch bip373 chip w/ a ford style E coil and that’s what controls every spark event on a 12x12 spark table that I can adjust on-the-fly with a laptop. The distributor is simply mechanically locked out and the megasquirt does the rest.
