In fact, the engineers at Argonne deliberately tried to overheat the reactor by shutting off its pumps and they failed.
I'm slightly skeptical wrt gas cooled reactors. Due to the low power density, the reactor needs to be physically big. And since the gas is under high pressure, the reactor needs to be a pressure vessel. Big pressure vessel usually means expensive.
One intriguing development is to use the TRISO kind of fuel that Ultra Safe has developed, but instead use molten salt as the coolant. That allows much higher power density, and doesn't need to be pressurized either as the operating temperature is well below the boiling point of the salt at atmospheric pressure. It also avoids the problem of having the fuel and highly radioactive and corrosive fission products dissolved in the salt, as molten salt reactors usually have.