But in reality, you can short all the pins to GND and then output high on all of them, and the chip survives indefinitely (although does get rather hot!).
It's really rather nice and robust.
However they're also pretty expensive (especially today, an m328p is over five bucks nowadays), and have been for around ten years or more.
Rather than a transistor I might just use a relay, mosfet, or motor driver module, since I can get extra features like short circuit protection and the ability to quickly swap without soldering anything, which gets exponentially more appealing the more times you have to repair something that's been made with discrete parts.
The use cases where I'd be working any other way are mostly outside of what I'd use an Uno or similar for anyway. And I probably wouldn't be using 5v at all for prototyping something to mass produce, since 3v3 is taking over.