I have owned multitudes of Apple laptops over the last dozen years or so and subjected them to all manors of hell... workshops, children, drunk me, travel etc and have never ONCE had a magsafe connector fray that way. So yea, you MUST be doing it wrong.

It’s plastic and a metal prong for an adapter that already costs $80 (if you buy it separately). And they want a 1/4 of that price. Yes, it’s ridiculously expensive.