If write caching is enabled, they always should “safely remove” an external USB drive. Even with write caching disabled, it’s good practice to always do this, since it will check if any files are currently using the drive. The same principle holds true for Linux, regardless of desktop environment.
Even people I knew who were not very computer savvy made “ejecting it from the tray icon” a routine thing before physically unplugging the USB drive. These are Windows users.
Disable write caching on the device in question perhaps? Not sure, as I haven’t tried it out recently. 
It’s a bit out of scope at this point, and there’s other alternatives such as the “sync” and “flush” mount options, and outright disabling write cache for the device itself. Never tried it recently, and I’m not sure what types of performance penalty you might get.