A knot would be a single turn common mode choke with an inductance of around 1nH, give or take depending on the cable. A lightning strike might generate a transient across this of possibly 10V, but you still will have a good couple of kV of spike going to the rest of the circuit. Still will kill the stuff on the end.
Only way it will not is if the length of wire after the knot happens to form a quarter wave stub on the cable at the equivalent frequency of the rise time of the pulse, and the knot was then a node with high voltage, while the appliance end was effectively short circuit and thus had no voltage across it. Not likely, I read of a church that had been converted to a business, where lightning struck the roof, at the lightning rod. the current arced through the multifoot thick stone wall at the point where an internal mains wire crossed the direct lead down of the lightning earth. the current flow was enough to vapourise sections of wire except at nodes in the ring mains, and blew all the equipment inside aside from one tape recorder ( it was a recording studio) that was faulty, and which was sitting in the middle of the floor with it's mains lead wrapped around it awaiting collection for repair.
The voltage drop across the lightning earth was enough to cause the voltage to arc through to the mains wiring. The maximum allowed resistance of a lightning earth is here 8 ohms, while a mains earth is allowed a maximum of 1 ohm. The lightning earth mat where I stay was built and specced to be under 1 ohm, and it is actually lower than the mains earth that is also bonded to it. It is likely the equipment attached to it will survive a direct strike, though you will have a big burn on one antenna that will need repair.