Roger,
When you consider the overall dynamic range of an astrophoto you can see that any brightish star is just much brighter than your object of interest. If you brighten the object without masking the brighter stars the brighter stars are guaranteed to white clip. Yes, for sure, if exposure subs are too long clipping of bright stars cannot be reversed. The solution, as best I can tell, is to take subs of different lengths.....short for good stars and long for good object of interest.
In this photo my subs were 5 min, but what I didn't put up on Astrobin was that I also used 1 min subs for star repair:
https://www.astrobin.com/406649/C/?nc=user
Peter