I meant this sort of jokingly. I think have a few linux systems that were never configured with swap partitions or swapfiles.
It's especially janky when you don't have swap. I've found adding a small swap file of ~500 MB makes it work so much better, even for systems with half a terabyte of RAM this helps reduce the freezing issues.
I haven't personally seen the OOM killer kill unproductively - usually it kills either a runaway culprit or something that will actually free up enough space to help.
For your "even for systems with half a terabyte of RAM", it is logical that the larger the system, the worse this behaviour is, because when things go sideways there is a lot more stuff to sort out and that takes longer. My work server has 1.5TB of RAM, and an OOM event before I installed earlyoom was not pretty at all.
I meant it more in the sense that it doesn't have to be more than a few hundred MB even for large RAM. It's not the size of the swap file that makes the difference, but its presence, and advice of having it be proportional to RAM are largely outdated.