I doubt it. Being low on coolant is far from being the ideal operating conditions. That being said I think you would need to be missing more than just a little coolant / have a lot of air in the system to cause that kind of an overheat problem.

My 3.0 cooling system failures on my old 93 started with a bad thermostat, which then lead to a head gasket failure. It was months before the headgasket completely blew. During those months it consumed a lot of coolant, and tended to spike the temp gauge under load.

When I had a fan clutch go the temp would rise in traffic and when moving slow, once the truck was at highway speeds the temp would head back to normal.