CanDeactivate guards prevent users from accidentally leaving routes with unsaved changes by prompting for confirmation before navigation. As the creator of CoreUI with extensive Angular development experience since 2014, I’ve implemented CanDeactivate guards in numerous form-heavy applications to prevent data loss. The most effective approach creates a generic guard that components can implement to control when they can be deactivated. This pattern provides excellent user experience by protecting against accidental data loss while maintaining flexible navigation control.