Yeah, maybe in addition to my survivorship bias from RHEL6-era images, I am mentally conflating samples from “we OOM killed sshd” and “we are swapping violently

Yeah, maybe in addition to my survivorship bias from RHEL6-era images, I am mentally conflating samples from “we OOM killed sshd” and “we are swapping violently; we won’t get in via sshd”. In fact, I would guess (especially given all this investigation!) that it’s much more likely that an inaccessible box is just under too much memory pressure for sshd to respond. Amusingly, the answer is still the same: serial port! :). Thanks again for all the pointers (to everyone in this thread).