> When I program, my application may sometimes allocate a lot of memory due to some silly bug

I had one of those cases a few years ago when a program I was working on was leaking 12 MP raw image buffers in a drawing routine. I set it off running and went browsing HN/chatting with friends. A few minutes later I was like "this process is definitely taking too long" and when I went to check on it, it was using up 200+ GB of RAM (on a 16 GB machine) which had all gone to swap.

I hadn't noticed a thing! Modern SSDs are truly a marvel... (this was also on macOS rather than Linux, which may have a better swap implementation for desktop purposes)