I was told by my friend that Eltam SR40 SRS ballasts can start 36W T8 lamps without any problem and can drive it to EOL without premature hard starting. He told me about a hotel at the Dead Sea, which have Gaash 40W T12 SRS fixtures with Eltam SR40 ballasts, which are used with 36W T8 without any problems of premature hard starting.
Also: SRS ballasts have twice the mains supply OCV, so if the mains voltage in the UK, is 240V, SRS ballast there, would have 480V OCV, which is sufficient to start European T8 lamps without problems until lamp EOL.
So why SRS ballasts, are generally considered incompatible with European T8 lamps?

Where did you get the "2x Vmains" figure from? As far as I know, SRS either does not boost the voltage at all, or only by few percent. Definitely nothing close to 480V or so, more like 250V. And while that is perfectly OK for T12, it is way too low for F36T8, that is why. Maybe if you are in some hot climate and you have the grounded sheet really close by, the lamp may ignite on it, but it won't be that much reliable. F36T8 would need higher voltage...
And yes, if it does ignite, SRS indeed does drives the lamp into oblivion...

Really the only difference between SRS and a standard choke is, the SRS provides electrode heating prior ignition and stops that after ignition without using any switch nor any other active component. Series choke needs a starter (= active switching component) or a heating transformer (= does not cut of the heating after ignition).

Read here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fluorescent_lamp at the Semi-Resonant Start section.
And my friend said me that the Eltam SR40 can start 36W T8 lamps without problems, and run them to EOL: https://www.lighting-gallery.net/gallery/displayimage.php?pos=-78360

The claim " the transformer and capacitor resonate at line frequency and generate about twice the supply voltage across the tube" is wrong in multiple ways. And shows a complete misunderstanding how the circuit even works.
First if it would really "resonate", the voltages involved would not be just twice the mains, but way higher.
And even the assumption "if the ballast winding inductance resonates with the capacitor", it does not apply here. It likely came from quite a misunderstanding how coupled inductors work: The way how the current flows when the lamp is not started means vast majority of the ballast inductance is cancelled out, only a tiny fraction leakage inductance between the two windings is what essentially remains in the circuit. And that is way too low to be even close to resonance at the mains frequency. Ballpark guess, the leakage is about 1..4% of the main inductance, so the resonant frequency of this circuit would be somewhere around 5x the mains at best. Yes, in theory when there would be no losses, it would boost the mains voltage by about 25% at the capacitor so by 12% at the lamp, but when the losses get involved, you are lucky to get 5% voltage boost at best. Nothing really significant.

What is essential about SRS is, the voltage across the capacitor leads to a current very similar to the normal arc current, available to warm up the filaments, so what flows into one end of filament flows out of the other.
Once the lamp ignites, the capacitor current remains essentially the same, but the phasing conditions on the ballast change so big portion of the currents into the lamp pins flow both in phase, essentially sharing the arc loading current. The component that passes through the filament is very small, So this set up keeps the filament loading rather low for the normal arc operation, preventing it from overheating. T12 used to be designed so the arc current flowing through just one terminal caused so large resistive heating, mainly when the tube got some hours on it, causing it to deteriorate faster as the tube aged. The SRS prevents this, so yields a bit longer overall tube life when running long hours at few starts.
With the starts the damage is not that far different from a regular starter, usually it ignites the arc way before the filaments are at proper temperature. If compared with a really good timing starter, it may even perform worse. These were the reason the main use was the commercial or street lighting, where the lamps tend to run many hours with just few starts.

@Medved: You can correct this in the article in Wikipedia.