Compared to the old days, it's even harder today to "ruin" good parts unless you're going to use liquid nitrogen or water-cooling. What kind of activities did you have in mind that you think could ruin your PC?
It's simply that I've never taken one apart or put one together before. I've heard the stories of people frying things, fucking up the CPU while trying to install it, and just general small mistakes leading to big costs. It all makes me feel I need to do a test run before tackling whatever my final rig ends up being. I need it to last a long time, so that means it'll be costly, and I don't think top-tier parts are fit for my untrained hands lol
Building a PC is basically grown-up Lego. All the parts (except a few very rare cases) are designed to only fit where they are meant to. If something doesn't fit right, then that's not where it goes.
CPUs in particular nowadays are much easier to install than they used to be. No pins to mess up anymore, and the top is covered by a heat spreader, so you're not going to chip the core like what used to happen a few decades ago.
Most components nowadays are built and designed like LEGO bricks. If it fits, it probably goes there. If you gotta force it, you’re probably putting something in the wrong spot.
Granted, CPUs can still be fragile and you have to put it in a certain way so as to not damage pins on the underside or your motherboard, depending on which generation we’re talking about, but if you read the instructions and pay attention to the guides made for you by the manufacturers, you’ll be okay. They generally will make a corner weird so it only fits in that way and no other to prevent you from putting it in the wrong way, for example.
RAM sticks are similar. They are not made symmetric on purpose because it is meant to go in one way and stay that way. And even with different generations, they are placed differently so a DDR3 stick will never accidentally fit without forcing it into a DDR4 slot, for example.
Even with stuff like thermal paste, they give you enough that if you make a mistake, you clean it up and reposition and still have enough to redo the process. I speak from experience on that one lol. Gotta get it right and then can screw down.
With prices being as crazy as they are, maybe you can buy old hardware from the DDR3/DDR2 generation and take it apart and put it back together as a test? Do this and build an era specific computer to play era specific games, like aiming for 2010 and get parts for that time meant to play games from around that time?