The break key unless you held down control was only a soft break though.
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!
It’s true that you could get a basic program back with old.
But any data was lost and I saw break get pressed accidentally fairly often at school and amongst friends.
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!