My experience is different. Running out of RAM without swap will cause the most memory–hungry process to die, whereupon systemd restarts it. Running out of RAM with swap causes thrashing and you can't serve any requests or ssh logins. Someone has to press the reset button then.

I suppose there are two common scenarios roughly.

If I did something (like try and decompress an archive) and I run out of memory I want that process to be killed.

If my system/config is simply not up to scratch and the normal services are causing thrashing that needs to be addressed directly and OOM kill isn't intended to help I don't think.