And the OOM Killer has been rewritten about twice entirely in the past decade. Christoph Lameter (one of my coworkers, who also wrote the SLUB memory allocator)

And the OOM Killer has been rewritten about twice entirely in the past decade. Christoph Lameter (one of my coworkers, who also wrote the SLUB memory allocator) wrote the very first one. Very little if any of his original code is in the current linux OOM Killer. The current approach does indeed work much better. You can entirely disable the OOM Killer for a given workload with those procfs handles.