I'm not sure what you mean by "strawman version of op amp oscillation"; for many it's the colloquial term for oscillation. You can accomplish it very easily with many classic distortion circuits, especially on a breadboard. Guitar pedals are almost always run off a unipolar 9V supply. Large bypass caps are the normal (usually cargo culted over as a 100u at the input).

There's a lot of constraints that either remain due to the restrictive power supply requirements on top of tradition or people building off designs from the 90s that were hand assembled and took BOM golf to the next level.