The description of a space elevator falling is rendered in horrific detail in Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy.
Twice.
Because the only known material strong enough at the time was diamond, and diamond doesn’t ablate much when falling through atmosphere.
One of the early space elevator research companies specifically designed a cable that was made by stacking successive layers of material both to slowly increase carrying capacity by building the tether in iterative layers, and hoping it would ablate or at least reach a quick terminal velocity in the case of catastrophic failure.
It is undoubtedly the case that the senior staff on that project were familiar with the Mars trilogy.
