Why on earth would you give the pilot an instruction that would almost certainly lead to a crash ? It seems like there aren’t enough sanity checks. Any such dodgy situation should trigger an alarm and disengage the auto pilot imo.
Commercial aviation is designed around highly trained people following defined procedures. Auto pilots are not supposed to second-guess the inputs because that adds to confusion and cognitive load on the pilots. Pilots tell the computer what to do, not the other way around.
What _should_ have happened here is the pilot monitoring should be watching the instruments and calling out flight stages. When the pilot flying didn’t initiate a proper climb they should have called this out, or taken over control until a safe altitude was established. This wasn’t an autopilot issue, this was a breakdown on crew resource management.
It's hard to say if it's a good thing or not, imagine an incorrect flight plan is entered but non 0, you could fly straight into another flight path or an obstacle, like a mountain.