Color of Anhydrous Transition Metal Salt
A ‘mere ionic salt’, when inspected properly, turns out to be nothing different from a coordination compound. One side (the cation) is electron deficient while the other side (the anion) has spare electrons, so there will be some kind of coordination happening from one to the other. Indeed, all salts adopt crystal structures so that the favourable coordination interactions are maximised.

For anhydrous cobalt(II) chloride, I would immediately expect a closest packing with cobalt ions sitting in tetrahedral voids, occuping ¼ of them to give $\ce{[CoCl4]}$ tetrahedrons where each chloride coordinates two neighbouring cobalt ions. Analogously for chromium(III) chloride, I would expect chromium to occupy one-third of the anion structure’s octahedral voids, giving rise to $\ce{[CrCl6]}$ octahedrons where again each chloride coordinates two chromiums. Both are thus clearly coordination compounds. And going by what I know about $\ce{Cu^{II}}$, that salt will probably be a set of square-planar $\ce{[CuCl4]}$ fragments, again where each chloride coordinates two coppers.

Note that all of these are rough guesses (I wouldn’t even call them educated) since you can only predict solid-state (ionic) structures so far a priori. Oftentimes you can arrive at multiple possibilities and even more times you are surprised at what is actually adopted but then retrospectively you can usually explain the structure somehow with coordination.