Maybe I'm just old-fashioned, but I much prefer the days of VGA/pre-VGA where software neither knew nor cared whether you had a monitor plugged in --- if the output on the GPU is enabled, then it will output video until/unless you disable it, end of story. None of this new "trying to be smart" complication that just leads to more weird and irritating failure modes.

I wonder if at least part of this is for DRM reasons, because having an always-on and "unauthenticated" video signal output does tends to frighten those IP control-freaks.

I do agree with all the others here that the time newer monitors take to sync to the signal is horribly long. CRTs and some older LCDs were basically instant (although the latter would sometimes auto-adjust on signal changes, meaning a slightly unstable display, at least it was still somewhat readable and visible --- crucial for reading things like BIOS screens, for example.)