> Does this result in programs more frequently erroring/crashing because they can't allocate?

I run Firefox, VSCodium with LSP, Discord, Signal and there's still space left for a game like CS2. I'm not a heavy user by any means.

> I'm not sure they would do much better than crash

I have yet to see a program that silently handles allocation failures and doesn't crash. These days everything is coded to crash if no memory :(

> About once a year a real runaway process (usually a throwaway program I'm working on) gets OOM-killed

In my case it killed system critical processes with no way to recover. With disabled overcommit, it freezes for a while (usually for a minute or two), I close some random program of my choosing and then see in Resource Monitor what's eating my ram.