Turning the system while energized will cause high currents to flow, but disconnecting it while operating will cause high voltage as the motor's magnetic field collapses. The high voltage is probably what will damage the driver. It is designed to handle high currents.
But turning a stepper like that is generally a bad idea. From Jones on Steppers:
It is also worth noting that the best way to demagnetize something is to expose it to a high frequency-high amplitude magnetic field. Running the control system to spin the rotor at high speed when the rotor is actually stalled, or spinning the rotor at high speed against a control system trying to hold the rotor in a fixed position will both expose the rotor to a high amplitude high-frequency field.
Unless there is some nuance of the question I am missing:
A constant voltage (L/R type) stepper motor driver for a stepper motor is a pair of H-bridges, with no current limiting / chopping. It is not that these devices are no longer made, they are typically not sold as "stepper motor drivers".
For instance, the classic L298 (L298N, L298D) dual H-bridge IC will drive a bipolar stepper in constant voltage mode, thus:
simulate this circuit – Schematic created using CircuitLab
Eliminate the sense resistors, and there is no current limiting left - or preferably leave them there, and size them purely for failure conditions i.e. short circuit protection.
At 160 Ohms minimum coil resistance and a 35 Volt motor supply, the resultant maximum 219 mA per channel is easily handled by the L298's 2 Ampere per channel DC current rating.
The L298 in its various variants is still manufactured: Go with the L298D to take advantage of the integrated back-EMF protection diodes, given the inductive load.
While there are also MOSFET based H-bridge ICs available, offering greater efficiency, this may be irrelevant in a design where the efficiency loss in the series R added to each coil is likely to be the biggest heat contributor anyway.
About using a chopper driver as an L/R driver: The qualified answer is yes, as long as basic full-step driving is being attempted. It is only with micro-stepping that fine current control becomes a necessity.
Some chopper drivers may not like not receiving current feedback, and may flag a fault, but the typical full-step driver will not care, it will simply pass all current up to the resistance-limited value of the stepper (160 to 219 mA per channel, at given coil specifications), and not initiate chopping.
Best Answer
It's the current in the windings that creates heat. The voltage does not matter in that context. As long as the current does not exceed the specifications it should be OK.