Most of the time I take the risk that it might break something and if it does (not sure it ever has) I know it was probably my fault. If I'm not batting 1.000 it would have to be something like 0.999.

If it's something really important like a presentation or something that I had to give I'd probably make sure I did the safely remove but it's pretty rare that I ever do it.

I think as long as it's a few seconds to give it time to flush the cache after you've finished writing you should be OK.

I think there is some kind of configuration for flushing immediately. I presume Windows may do this by default given that most people just yank them out.