yup. i recall first being exposed to this while trying to understand why a memory-hog backend service was being oom-killed in production while attempting to spawn a resource-light subprocess via fork+exec, while there was still a good portion of free memory to use.

the more you read about linux oom killer, overcommit, linux memory accounting heuristics, copy-on-write, fork+exec as a mechanism to spawn an unrelated process, the more surprising it is that anything works at all even some of the time.