This isn't quite true. The system does recover. The mechanism doing the recovery is the kernel OOM killer which begins to shoot processes to free up RAM. Now whether or not the processes you care about survive or not and whether they lost any data you care about is a different question. 🤭 That's a problem elegantly solved on Android by the introduction of its more complex lifecycle which provides data persistence guarantees.

Actually the swapping is what freezes up the PC writing to disk like it was RAM is just too slow.. If you don't have swap enabled, either the kennel will throw out processes or one could crash cause of memory errors.