Surge protection is one of those precautions that depends heavily on where you are going. In countries with stable grids, hotel and rental outlets are as reliable as home and your electronics need nothing special. In regions with frequent outages, generator switchovers or visible voltage fluctuation, flickering lights are the tell, surges and brownouts genuinely do kill chargers and occasionally laptops, and a compact travel surge protector earns its place in the bag.
The practical setup most long-term travelers converge on: a small travel power strip with surge protection and USB ports, plugged into the wall through a single local adapter. That solves the eternal shortage of outlets in hotel rooms, charges everything overnight from one socket, and puts a sacrificial layer between the grid and your devices.
For genuinely unstable grids, long-stay expats go further with voltage stabilizers or small UPS units for desktop gear and routers. For a normal trip, dual-voltage chargers plus one surge-protected travel strip covers virtually every realistic risk.