The more you use your card the more chance of getting skimmed using cash for small purchases is a way of reducing your attack surface.
I don't get why people care about this. Credit card fraud is the bank's problem, not mine.
For starters it's irresponsible, secondly the cost goes back to the banks customers anyway. But also, one day the bank will say no. You didn't do what we expect of you, we will not give you anything.
This is not that uncommon and if it happens you might loose a lot (although to keep good faith and keep people using the cards the banks usually go to great lengths to cover up that fraud ever happens and they usually repay losses of their customers, but I seriously do not get why anyone would be willing to take that risk - even the hassle of having to get in touch with your bank and temporarily be out on a lot of money etc. is enough to avoid that risk).
Not to mention that I don't feel like "it's okay, the bank took care of it" is okay. The bad guys got away with it and that is never okay.
No really, the card readers are damn quick these days so it hardly takes much longer than paying with cash but I admit that it takes slightly longer. I would argue that most people pay their morning coffee with card in Sweden.
I have used my card all over the world, for small and large purchases, and have yet to get it skimmed - lucky I guess.
But another aspect of increased card use is that tax fraud becomes harder for the businesses as I believe the logging of card transactions are quite a lot harder to hide from the tax authority so I do see that as a positive thing.
Chip based readers are safe, since the chip actually performs cryptographic operations itself - the private key is never copied out.