I hear what you are say and I can't disagree with the possible failure mechanism, however I've cycled chips into and out of my Arduino 328 clone board literally hundreds of times and have never had a problem. I've also plugged the chip in backwards and off-by-one a couple of times without chip or board damage, but of course I don't recommend one do that on purpose.
Maybe they've gotten better since the 1980's? I know that on the old 8-bit microcomputers that I started with, it was always warned about such things (and people now experience them directly refurbishing these old machines), especially in regards to memory (which was a bunch of plug-in DIP RAM into sockets).
Perhaps they've made the socket's metal contact springs out of better material since then? Or maybe you've gotten lucky with your board?
There is one thing about a ZIF socket, though - its much easier to put an IC in it and extract it than from a regular socket (which is easy to bend pins on)...
