I think I killed only one AVR in a long time tinkering. They even tolerate pretty severe over-voltage well, probably because they support EEPROM-style parallel

I think I killed only one AVR in a long time tinkering. They even tolerate pretty severe over-voltage well, probably because they support EEPROM-style parallel HV programming. However they're also pretty expensive (especially today, an m328p is over five bucks nowadays), and have been for around ten years or more.