I've OOMd on my mac several times, and it has never gone completely unresponsive.
You get an OOM dialog with a list of apps that you can have it kill.
I feel I just need to run a slightly too large LLM with too much context on a MBP, and it's enough to slow it down irreparably until it suddenly hard resets. Maybe the memory pressure it does that at is much higher though compared to Linux?
Hilariously this happens on windows too.
Actually everything you said windows and mac doesn't do they do, if you put on a ton a memory pressure the system becomes unresponsive and locks up...