The trouble with that method would be that if you unplugged most of the valves, the capacitance at each step of the line would change, so the line would no longer match the terminating resistor. Then it would develop standing waves and add to the problem.
By that logic, the transmitter would be really screwed up with the loss of a single tube. What it would do is mess up the gain at a part of the overall bandwidth. Since each tube is coupled by a network, you can probe each section to narrow down the problem. There wasn't much to fail in a working design. Mostly the capacitors which would be cheap to shotgun if you didn't know how to troubleshoot the circuit.
Are we talking about a baseband (0..6 MHz) signal or UHF channel ?
For a single channel UHF operation, why not use some Wilkinson dividers to combine the output power from multiple tubes/transistors ? If one module failed, no big issue.
;-)
It was DC to 5 MHz, and designed over 50 years ago.
Harris has done that for decades in their solid state transmitters. AM, FM & TV.
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