16 years in AC and refrigeration equipment design, all commercial and industrial but a little of everything whether it be cataloged or completely custom, process and data centers, comfort, refrigerated warehouses and lately a lot of supermarket.
Good call on at line burial thing. The liquid will find the coolest parts of the system so there would almost certainly be times where that buried line had a bunch of liquid just waiting for the compressor to come on and suck it in. I've seen a lot go into preventing and surviving liquid into a compressor...in fact all of our stuff includes heaters in the compressor so its always the warmest place in the circuit.
In my last job I was a system design engineer on rotary screw compressor chillers. I was working on integrating a new 150 ton compressor and variable speed drive and one of the tests I did was to ice the compressor overnight with the compressor heaters off to get liquid to settle inside it until it was completely full, and then hit the go button. The expectation was that the drive recognized the pattern in the compressor input current and shut it down within fractions of a second. Fortunately it passed, but we did that test last just in case as that custom cast and machined prototype cost about $80k and took months to get made.
Years before that i visited the R&D facility of a major compressor manufacturer and saw where they were doing an accelerated life/liquid injection test on a new scroll compressor. It has been running non stop for months and every few minutes they would hit it with something like 20 pounds of straight liquid. All I saw was about 2 inches of compressor housing exposed in a huge ball of ice. None of them like liquid but scrolls seem to take it better than screws, at least partially because their housings act as a built-in accumulator.