I don't think a dead short for part of the cycle is the right way to think about it. The inductor has a bunch of impedence unless the switch fails. You might b

I don't think a dead short for part of the cycle is the right way to think about it. The inductor has a bunch of impedence unless the switch fails. You might be doing a short through some parasitics for a bit, but in the ideal case, you're not. The new chips typically do soft start on their own, the problem is you need input caps, which really are a dead short when first connected. Which wouldn't normally be an super big issue with small ceramic capacitors, except the cable inductance forms an accidental boost converter that wants to give your actual converter a voltage spike.