Personally, I prefer UPSs with solid state circuit breaker. I connect my power strips to a UPS.
CME is over-hyped though. It only loads up on exposed metal wire and cannot travel through walls to get into a house. The high tension cables and residential distribution lines (inc. transformers) have had over voltage protection for a long time. I have aerial electrical in my area so I have to take some precaution that buried electrical line users don’t.
Surprisingly the worst damage I took was when our power came back on after Irma. Apparently, some people on our grid did not disconnect their house circuit from the grid when they ran their generators. I.e. a separate breaker panel for the generator which is isolated from the house panel so they can shut off the main breaker and provide generator power to the house -not the street.
When electrical power was restored these ppls’ generator power was added on top of the line power. It was my misfortune to be up at 2am when the power was restored. I saw the street lights were on and went and turned off the generator and re-connected to line power (toggled generator panel breakers to Line Power and turned on the main breaker). Whack, there went one of the LED rows in my microwave’s display panel. I knew right away why. At 2am not many ppl on generator are awake to manually switch back to line power. If they haven’t shut off their main breaker they’re putting their generator output onto the grid. The expensive, automated generator systems are apparently few and far between in my neighborhood.
I have an UPS with a mechanical breaker. It clicks pretty much all day long, but it is adequate in conjunction with surge arrestors. The very fast but quite hypothetical EMP pulse will simply fry all electronics, surge arrestor or not. I am not worried about CME personally although the economy and society will take a hit. Nor do I worry about the dirty neighborhood even without a brownout or blackout. I have lots of electronics completely off the grid and the microwave is unplugged most of the time.