Welcome to the Zoom Community, @DaveV.
There's no specific thing to prevent a Meeting ID from being "lost forever", other than knowing and implementing good Zoom account management practices. When an employee departs (for whatever reason), if the IT/Zoom admin deletes the departed staff member's account... it's just gone forever.
I highly recommend you and your IT/Zoom team be familiar with this Zoom Support article:
https://support.zoom.com/hc/en/article?id=zm_kb&sysparm_article=KB0066997
There are options of "Click Transfer Data then Delete or Delete Now Without Data Transfer" available in several places; Transfer Data then Delete gives the admin the opportunity to assign the assets of the user being removed to another user.
If you don't mind sharing all of your meetings with someone else as a backup person, look into Scheduling Privilege, which allows two people to have their own meetings, but also has access to each other's meetings, with the ability to: start the other person's meeting, edit the other person's meeting, change the ownership of the other person's meeting to themself, and more.
See this Zoom Support article for details:
https://support.zoom.com/hc/en/article?id=zm_kb&sysparm_article=KB0061749
Reach out if you'd like some additional guidance.