In modern ethernet, there is also flow-control via the PAUSE frame. This is not for collisions at the media level, but you might think of it as preventing collisions at the buffer level. It allows the receiver to inform the sender to slow down, rather than just dropping frames when its buffers are full.

At least in networks I've used, it's better for buffers to overflow than to use PAUSE.

Too many switches will get a PAUSE frame from port X and send it to all the ports that send packets destined for port X. Then those ports stop sending all traffic for a while.

About the only useful thing is if you can see PAUSE counters from your switch, you can tell a host is unhealthy from the switch whereas inbound packet overflows on the host might not be monitored... or whatever is making the host slow to handle packets might also delay monitoring.