Ugh. I would much rather know that the process died because of allocation failure than try to figure out why some code is trying to write to a random null pointer as these are two very different types of bugs.
Of course, there is no reason to not do all your allocation through a wrapper function which does check and abort on failure. I think the point was that surviving malloc failures is a dubious approach - instead go all in, or if it's a long-running service, provide a configurable max memory cap and assume that much will be available.
I'll take the clear error message.