Since you are dealing with pre-fabricated production-grade boards, it is very unlikely that they will have any isolation gates to accessisolate the EEPROM chips when the board is powered off. Therefore the most sensible and straight-forward solution is to use a SOIC-8 socket with a small matching footprint.
If you really need a very frequent turn-around, you need to design an interposer (preferrably on a flex cable) to any suitable EEPROM emulator until the code content is finalized.