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It depends on how particles hit, the airflow will divide over the surface and pit more evenly. I even had pitting on some areas of my wheel spokes. I estimated tens of thousands of pits on headlights, mirror covers, wheel spokes, various areas of the paint, windshield, grille, etc with about 5 seconds passing through the dust cloud. Probably air velocity up to 200km/h combining my forward velocity and the highest swirling wind speed. A sand blaster at about 50PSI pressure will have equivalent particle speed.
I would expect lens coating could be more affected where the air flow is more glancing due to the higher shear forces compared with a direct impact which would leave a deeper pit, but affect a smaller area.
In the case of my 2 week old Nissan Pathfinder that went through the dust devil, it looked like it had 5 to 10 years of pitting that could only be alleviated with a repaint and replacement of all the impacted parts. For various reasons I just decided to live with it, instead of having a full cosmetic repair under insurance.
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