It's also a lot less likely that you'll get kicked in the head though. Successfully getting a head kick off on someone is hard, especially when they are allowed to tackle and grapple.
Doubly so since you can't do various strikes against someone's head once they have three points of contact with the ground. No knees or kicks to the head when down like the early UFC days.
My intuition is that many less powerful strikes are worse for your health than one very powerful one. But I'm not a doctor and that's just a wild guess. I would like to see some studies about this.
I think the ratio of kicks to the head in the mean MMA bout and punches to the head in the mean boxing match is a lot more than 1:20; probably closer to 1:500.
