Many times .. over 30 years. And yes, it was mostly due to bugs in the code, which I wouldn't have been able to assess if my machine had just OOM'ed everything

Many times .. over 30 years. And yes, it was mostly due to bugs in the code, which I wouldn't have been able to assess if my machine had just OOM'ed everything. That's the point: swap gives you a little leeway for these analyses.