I've had a "make -j" fail due to virtual memory exhaustion (granted, on a 32-bit VM). This was on a C++ project, so it might be less of a problem when building the kernel, but it's definitely not a reasonable default across the board.
I've had similar issues, though it was actually caused by Ninja, and not Make. I was doing a build of clang+llvm itself, and somehow all the link steps ended up happening about the same time. It really exhausted the memory on my system. My system has 32 GiB, of which I rarely go above 10GiB used except for those giant builds.