The fundamental problem is that your machine is running software from a thousand different projects or libraries just to provide the basic system, and most of them do not handle allocation failure gracefully. If program A allocates too much memory and overcommit is off, that doesn't necessarily mean that A gets an allocation failure. It might also mean that code in library B in background process C gets the failure, and fails in a way that puts the system in a state that's not easily recoverable, and is possibly very different every time it happens.

For cleanly surfacing errors, overcommit=2 is a bad choice. For most servers, it's much better to leave overcommit on, but make the OOM killer always target your primary service/container, using oom-score-adj, and/or memory.oom.group to take out the whole cgroup. This way, you get to cleanly combine your OOM condition handling with the general failure case and can restart everything from a known foundation, instead of trying to soldier on while possibly lacking some piece of support infrastructure that is necessary but usually invisible.

There's also cgroup resource controls to separately govern max memory and swap usage. Thanks to systemd and systemd-run, you can easily apply and adjust them on arbitrary processes. The manpages you want are systemd.resource-control and systemd.exec. I haven't found any other equivalent tools that expose these cgroup features to the extent that systemd does.

This is a better explanation and fix than others I've seen. There will be differences between desktop and server uses, but misbehaving applications and libraries exist on both.