In most cases, mismatching lamps and ballasts typically causes overheated ballasts, cycling lamps, decreased lamp life, and all sorts of problems. In most cases, the problems tend to arise after a couple of minutes or a matter of hours. In rare cases, if you know what you are doing, a lamp/ballast mismatch can also allow the lamp to run properly and the ballast to run without any issues. I wonder if there are any cases in which a lamp/ballast mismatch causes instant lamp burnout or instant ballast burnout?

Never known ballasts to instantly burn out, wire wound ballasts are pretty hard wearing!, lamps too have pretty good thresholds of ‘overload’, I’ve had T5 8 watt tubes burn out within a couple of minutes, but this is running them to the extreme on the likes of 250 watt gear!!
I once, ( out of interest ), ran an EOL 18 watt SOX on a 400 watt mercury ballast, ( please don’t try this people )!, it fully ran up within about 25 seconds!, but the tubes glass started to mutate and change shape right in front of my eyes!, at which point I turned it off.
Really stupid I know, as it could have very easily exploded in my face, but the fact the discharge actually started and ran up shows what tolerances extreme miss matches of lamp and gear will handle!