Still, you should not be able to brick your device into a state like this with legitimate, normal, non elevated operations.

If the POSIX API does have some limitation which would prevent this error from occurring with higher level APIs (which I sincerely doubt), macOS should simply start failing with errno = ENOSPC earlier for POSIX operations.

There is no other system that behaves like this, and we wouldn't be making excuses like this if Microsoft messed something basic up like this.