When you summon a falling tnt block, weird things start to happen.
/summon minecraft:falling_block ~ ~ ~ {Block:tnt,Time:1,Data:1}
The debug screen shows explode=ture
.
When you break it, it explodes.
When you break it in survival mode, it drops tnt, but still explodes.
TNT with a damage value of 1 is explode = true.