If they had just stuck with 12VDC and buildings had 12VDC wall sockets everywhere, everything would have been fantastic.
I also had a PoE HAT for a RPi that smoked it. Never doing PoE again. 48V and 3.3V electronics probably don't belong within 10cm of each other.
No, there aren't, not in the way you imply. There is the IEEE 802 PoE standards, which are all compatible (save for not enough power), and designed to carefully negotiate and especially never break non-PoE devices. And there is bullshit (sorry) like "Passive PoE" that is ironically an active violation of the IEEE specs, can break pretty much anything, and you shouldn't buy so the likes of Ubiquiti and Mikrotik finally get the wallet vote and stop f*cking doing. Unfortunately, the proper PoE PD logic is a few dollars of extra expense.
Yes, there is a slightly higher risk of killing devices due to faults in the PoE supply logic. I have the official PoE HAT for a RPi 4. I have to say it is somewhat poorly designed due to space constraints; the isolation between 48V and 3.3V should be better. I'm not even sure the RPi PoE HAT is spec compliant.
But I don't think you can/should blame this on PoE.
I'm not surprised they can f* up a basic PoE injector. The reason for doing passive PoE is saving a few bucks, on the back of safety and compatibility. Of course they would try to pinch hard on the PoE injector too.
Oh and I'd say they (together with Mikrotik) are responsible for 90% of the bad rep PoE gets. The IEEE 802 stuff really just works. And I say that having been part of rolling out 15000 people conference deployments with several hundred wifi APs in the span of a few days. The only real problem is broken cables, but the Ethernet link commonly fails before PoE is impacted.
I did have issues with some of their other products - eg an old CloudKey gen1 that I had remotely in my parents place that I think ran out of space to the point it can’t update itself and can’t compact some old mongodb.