I used to teach microcontrollers and when we covered EEPROMs I would always stress to make sure the EEPROM wasn't written unnecessarily and that it could be destroyed in under a second by repeatedly writing a location in a program loop.Even so, every couple of years there would be a student who inadvertently (I hope!) did just that.
Professionally I've used the EEPROM in many products where it provides non-volatile storage of product settings. In these applications the contents of the EEPROM was copied into RAM at power-up and would only be written back if the configuration was changed, and then only after a few seconds. There was no way it would ever reach the writing limit! The products ran 24/7 and had 5 year guarantees against failure. None that I knew of ever failed for this reason.