On servers, in almost every situation, I'd rather have the server reboot than have some random process crash and leave the system in a potentially broken state.
On desktops, in every situation, I'd rather have X, my window manager and an emergency terminal pinned to RAM so I can always decide what to kill for myself. (https://github.com/stiletto/angrymlocker helps with setting this up.)
Set the OOM killer to trigger a reboot? Crawling to a swapping halt is the worst of both worlds, it's like a full system crash but the server never comes back.
And a crashing service should get restarted, involving journal file recovery which is consistent state.
So many things depend on so many gigabytes of overcommit, that seems like a pretty bad way to go about it in the general case.
> And a crashing service should get restarted, involving journal file recovery which is consistent state.
I think you're agreeing with me with this sentence?