It's just as bad to click a button you don't want to, when you're merely trying to scroll, or highlight text, or click another button.
Making a button's clickable area larger than the button itself can be desirable in limited circumstances, but it's not a general-purpose solution.
Argue with Apple because Mobile Safari makes a tap close to a button click the button (and it causes exactly the problems you've predicted, and workarounds are difficult). Do you do a lot of close testing?? Because the feature is quite noticeable.
Try it yourself on an iPhone (ideally use something that can do smaller taps than a finger, with zoom and without zoom): https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Reference/...
I recall that similar features are more obvious on Android because you can make taps visible.
Virtual keyboards also have interesting responses to close taps on key buttons.
I also recall an obscure fix necessary for Mobile Safari. If you wanted something clickable near an <input> you needed to take care how you designed it because otherwise the <input> would steal the click. You could add an onclick handler (Mobile Safari has a bunch of heuristic hacks where onclick= will cause differences to touch behaviours when a touch is on an element that has a click handler. You could also use a button which might or might not be more accessible depending on needs and design. I recall I needed a lot of fiddling depending on each control.
Ex: a.fn-link { padding:10px 18px; margin:-10px -18px; }
You can set a (pseudo) element as an invisible enlargement of that button but then you will get accidental taps.