Not exactly the kind of respect it would like to get
Not exactly as funny meme as I would like it to be, but I just found out about that feature after having to hold the power button due to a frozen system countless times, and I had to tell someone.
Not niche there can be times when you want to run something heavy and it auto kills the exact thing you are trying to run. You have a 1gb ram device and it kills everything? Thats undesirable
It makes system unresponsive, true. But its still running the main things, the render or decompressing or whatever. So it eventually unfreezes when it completes, by giving other programs(including GUI) back the CPU and ram.
It always had reliability issues with bad hardware, and computers boot incredibly quickly nowadays. But yeah, it requires swap, and if you want it, there's a sibling answer here about sawppiness.