Articles like this make me feel really out of touch. Honest questions: has it become standard practice to write applications that don't handle heap overflow at

Articles like this make me feel really out of touch. Honest questions: has it become standard practice to write applications that don't handle heap overflow at all because it's meant to be handled at the kernel level by specialists such as the author? As an alternative to using an OOM killer, why doesn't the kernel stop granting memory when it runs out and let the application that requested it sink or swim?