Tonearms without anti-skate, damage to records?

Anti-skating, however imperfect, is better than not applying some compensating force.  Just ask the people who manufacture cartridges and who have studied wear of records and styli (like the folks at SoundSmith). 

Arms that maintain tangency of the cantilever to the groove (like the Garrard zero 100 DO NOT eliminate skating force.  As long as the cantilever does not point back directly to the pivot point, skating forces are developed.  Air bearing arms, that slide along a tube to maintain tangency, for example, do not develop skating forces, but, many have extremely high horizontal inertial mass, and lacking the mechanical advantage of a fulcrum (pivot point), it takes considerable force to move the arm and this sort of negates the advantage of no skating force. 

There are some quite elaborate designs that maintain the low inertial mass of conventional pivoted arms without having an offset angle to the headshell (hence the cantilever points directly back to the pivot) that maintain proper tangency, like the Reed 5A and Schroeder LT (linear tonearm), but these arms are not cheap.

Yes, "not cheap" is an understatement.  I went to an audio show where a representative was in the market area of the show and had the 5T arm (mostly used record dealers and headphone sellers are in this area).  He told me that he could sell me the arm right there.  When he told me the price, I looked in the bill-fold area of my wallet and declared that I didn't quite have that amount (it was something like $20k).

I have not seen the LT, but I did help with the setup of a Schroeder arm on a friend's table.  That was a bit scary because the arm was suspended on a very thin monofilament nylon fishing line that looked pretty easy to snap, and both the arm and the cartridge were "not cheap."