Back in the olden days we did, occasionally have to deal with inductive kick on a relay that cycled 30 or 40 times a second but the diode was a stack of metal disks the size of a quarter, coated in selenium.
It really became important when we picked relays with transistors but by then you could get a silicon rectifier (IBM P/N 2311232)
We never heard what the "N" number was but they kept getting tougher and it was hard to blow one up. I still have some.
The other one that was tough was a L/L coil on a 3p wye. The problem is most solid state switches want to disconnect on the zero crossing. L/L on a wye is never zero so they always open under a load. We blew up a lot of stuff with that problem. In one case where a fat solenoid was blowing the RC net we ended up with a wire wound and a motor start capacitor.
In another it was a little shaded pole motor (36 per machine) cycling a few times a minute that would blow a 2a SSR. After we tried a bunch of RC tricks, they just sent us boxes of 10a SSRs.
