I always thought that Apple ][ + was as good as it gets. It's been downhill from there, for Apple and for the rest of us.
Instant response. A full reboot was a control break away. Instant access to the interpreter. Easy assembly access.
I thought, it executed.
I remember our school moving from the networked bbc’s to the PC’s and it was a huge downgrade for us as kids. Computer class became operating a word processor or learning win 3.11 rather than the exciting and sometimes adversarial (remote messaging other terminals, spoofing etc) system that made us want to learn, to just more drudgery.
Having an ordinary key on the keyboard that would effectively kill -9 the current program and clear the screen was a crazy design decision, especially for a machine where saving data meant using a cassette tape!
Your program would still be in memory with an \>OLD command.
As long as it was a basic prog, the machine code loaded *RUN was lost and had to be reloaded from tape, yes.
A pain for games but I don’t really recall accidentally pressing the break key much it was out of the way up right.
I could talk about this all day!
But any data was lost and I saw break get pressed accidentally fairly often at school and amongst friends.
Example: https://youtu.be/ls-PxqRQ35Q?t=178