You know over time I've come to consider devices this hard to manipulate as failures. No less so than if the hardware is terrible. Such things are booby trapped. Does not mean you cannot master the issues and make them work, but still a horrible way to design something. In the past I'd put in the time and make things like that work. Don't have the patience for it much more.
Again, I don´t work for Sound Devices but if, for instance, you break something connected to an input of a mixing desk or microphone preamp because you enabled phantom power by mistake you can hardly blame the desk manufacturer.
The use case for these mixer+recorders (and note that I use mine for field recording, I am not a movie "sound mixer") is recording isolated channels, plus creating a stereo mix and likely feeding that same stereo mix to a camera. Sound mixers usually employ limiters and, as Sound Devices says, they are present in all the gain stages: Preamps, mixer faders, line outputs and headphone outputs.
It's not a booby trap. But certainly these devices are very, very far from plug and play.
When the first generation was launched they released two versions actually. The "standard" version and a special "musician" version which is much simpler to use, more lke a "portastudio".
To make things even more fun they have optional "plugin" licenses to enable the musician mode or activate an "auto-mix" mode great for interview recording.
By the way, those "treacherous" limiters can literally save your hearing when recording. The headphone amplifier is quite powerful and the dynamic range can be dangerous.