I would prefer a process on my desktop be killed rather than my system become unusable to the point of requiring a hard reset of the machine as is common on Linux systems during low memory scenarios.
My guess is that something causes a kernel panic, like the filesystem getting itself into trouble with the hardware.
Of course the remedy is to have no or very little swap configured, but that's not obvious when compared to other operating systems (for example on Windows more swap never hurts, and the system recovers very quickly once memory pressure is gone)
In fact it has been completely fine for me to remove it.
The time I wasted having to kill orphaned processes and restarting everything, daily, was easily greater than the hard resets, which happen like once a year or so to me.
Disabling swap is a very coarse optimization. The ultimate problem is performance. If you have 16GB RAM + 10GB of stuff sitting completely idle, that works perfectly fine. If you have 16GB RAM + no swap + a process that requires 15GB RAM and uses all of that constantly, it's going to be painful, as the kernel tries to compensate by squeezing memory out of anywhere it can, over and over.
I'd love a setting on Linux to tell it to treat executable pages memory-mapped from disc as Really Important and never evict them. It'd have to come with a suitable warning that if you set this then you get exactly what you deserve, but TBH it probably is what most people actually think is happening already and want.