A Mac is certainly better at handling these kinds of issues but it's by no means totally safe. It tries to compress memory and dynamically allocate more swap, but there's still a limit and you can see that if you accidentally run programs with way higher RAM requirement than you have. I've had multiple occasions where my program used so much RAM that even moving the cursor is an exercise in patience, never mind switching to a terminal window and typing commands to kill the process.

A Mac will keep creating virtual memory swap up to some limit (some multiple of the amount of physical RAM — can't quite remember, possibly 5x) and then it will produce a kind of vague dialog box saying "You've run out of application memory" with a list of applications to force quit.

But at least you can recover rather cleanly from the issue.