Yes, I put mine in low-profile zif sockets, additionally, I put ESD protection diodes on the joystick ports because that's where you're most likely to touch and fry (including the orignal sid and cias)
What's the advantage of low profile sockets? Sounds convenient, but I just used pretty ordinary DIP sockets. (At least I have a puller to get chips out now though; jimmying with a flathead screwdriver never felt great.)
In terms of space, it feels like there's plenty of room in mine. I have the Perifrantic VIC-II switcher setup as well, which sockets a daughterboard with 2 VIC-IIs into the socket, and that fits surprisingly well. Though, I'd not be surprised if some models had less room to work with.
I wanted ZIF sockets for three reasons things: I want to be able to swap out chips (and their fake replacements) easily to test compatibility and stuff like that. The chance of breaking the pins off of the vintage chips is very real, especially with repeated pulls/pushes. They also put a more constant pressure on the pins, so they _should_ have less of "popping out" the chips, which the wipe-contact type of sockets do a bit sometimes.
The low-profiles I wanted for two reasons, aesthetics, I like how they look, comared to the traditional tall green/cyanish giant monstrocities, and practical: Some of my fake devices are tall, and I risk running out of room in the C64c case (also true for chips below the keyboard), but also, the traditional zif sockets have a much larger footprint than a standard dip socket, and so they actually don't fit on my C64, they collide with decoupling caps AND with each other in one axis (I think it was the PLA and SID that couldn't coexist).
So, I opted for the waaahy more expensive low-profile ones
