Java allowed to handle out-of-memory rather well if one wanted to even 25 years ago. Basically one allocated a buffer on a startup taking 5% of memory that the application was supposed to use and made all threads to catch the oom exception. When handling that the buffer would be released, GC would be forced and a special flag would be set asking app to cancel any memory-intensive tasks until enough memory would be released and the buffer can be allocated again. It worked extremely well.

> Does this result in programs more frequently erroring/crashing because they can't allocate?

I run Firefox, VSCodium with LSP, Discord, Signal and there's still space left for a game like CS2. I'm not a heavy user by any means.

> I'm not sure they would do much better than crash

I have yet to see a program that silently handles allocation failures and doesn't crash. These days everything is coded to crash if no memory :(

> About once a year a real runaway process (usually a throwaway program I'm working on) gets OOM-killed

In my case it killed system critical processes with no way to recover. With disabled overcommit, it freezes for a while (usually for a minute or two), I close some random program of my choosing and then see in Resource Monitor what's eating my ram.