@verdre Sorry for sounding like reply guy but this is just unfair comparison.
Kernel OOM is last resort thing, meant to prevent complete freezing of system, which both Linux and MacOS have. MacOS can handle this better because it uses also (partially, more on that later) userspace Jetsom (its not rly named that on MacOS but iOS, but its essentially the same system) handler which monitors memory usage and does actions to prevent memory from going critically high so to not trigger the OOM.
There are systems like that on linux, like systemd-oomd, tho it's done more poorly and those also just kill apps, but before they trigger the kernel OOM.
There are also dynamic swap solutions like swapd, which do more or less the exact same thing, but it's not part of the kernel, which means it has to be installed.
I am not saying that ur wrong about the handling of it on Linux (by default), it's mostly done poorly on most if not all distributions by default, and yeah sure distro's could allow to set it up easier so that they also have dynamic swap, but it's not just a Kernel thing and I dislike this "don't let kernel devs fool you".
It's an desktop implementation and usespace issue, not kernel.
Again sorry for long reply but you insulted ppl based on a fallacious comparison so like lol