Totally a hypothetical question ;)

Let's say someone hadn't worked a carbureted Mopar for about 25 years.

They went to pickup a 1972 Dart with a 318, 904, 107k miles, 500+ miles from home.

They were smart enough to take a spare carb with them but it was a cheap chinese universal bbd clone.

On first start, gas poured out of the old carb so they swapped out with the new carb.

The new carb worked perfect out of the box but didn't have a return spring built into the throttle plate (which they didn't notice), nor did it have the hardware for the external return spring. No problem they took the hardware for the linkage off the old carb and put it on the new setup. But the external spring didn't have enough tension to return the throttle to idle. Oh but look, there's this random spring laying in the muck of the intake. SO they rigged this spring up to add more tension. They went merrily on their way and drove the car 500+ miles back home, sometimes at over 70 mph.

They did notice that it had weird shift points and behavior. Like it wouldn't shift into Drive till about 48 mph and then downshifted to First at about 28 mph.

Fast forward about a month. Hypothetically. The float in the cheap Carter knock-off went bad. In the process of working on it in front of a parts store, the kickdown linkage disappeared.

So while researching to find a new one they discovered that that second spring they found laying on the intake originally - actually belonged to the kickdown linkage. They also read that having the linkage in this state will likely cause harm to the tranny.

So the hypothetical question is:

If some dingleberry did this, how likely is it that they hurt the transmission?

Thanks.