There are a number of possible ways a faulty time machine could destroy a universe. These can be catalogued under three headings:
1) preventing it retroactively, this is the opposite of a boot-strap paradox as instead of part of a universe causing itself (and the universe it is in), part of a universe anulls itself (and the universe it is in). Consider Dirac's hypothesis of the universe as a particle moving forward and backward in time, interacting with itself until all matter is woven from it - then blow that particle up, before it interacts with itself the first time. [Not in Doctor Who, but in other science fiction Barrington Bayley has a short-story in which this happens].
2) blowing all of it up at once, for example in Douglas Adam's unmade Doctor Who film "Doctor Who and the Krikkitmen" [recently novelised by James Goss], and the ultimate weapon works by opening space-time conduits between the cores of all suns causing simultaneous hypernovae. As the destruction of the TARDIS explicitly causes the cracks in the universe, one hypothesis would be that they link suns in such a way.
3) Affecting space-time itself. A hypotheis explained here:
https://cosmosmagazine.com/physics/vacuum-decay-ultimate-catastrophe suggests that if our universe is of a certain kind, specific interactions could collapse the vaccuum itself. Such an effect would propogate at apparent faster than light speeds and would conceivably unravel space-time.
None of the above is expressly stated within the fiction, but all are possible without postulating infinite energies within the TARDIS itself.
Additionally, although this is not true in Doctor Who, in which time travel exists as a mature technology, Larry Niven has hypotheised that all universes in which time travel is possible destroy themselves through cumulative paradoxes leaving only those universes in which time travel is impossible.