I guess I've just been unlucky because the OOM killer has always made bizarre decisions on my machines and killed something more critical than the runaway process (or just not worked at all, not sure what the deal was is that, I never get logs). Every time I looked it up online the replies were just "you need to enough RAM to run your process, idiot, you should never need swap, swap is bad"

If the normal case is that the OOM killer just kills the out-of-control process, then I forfeit my argument.