death by swap

You can still set the vm.overcommit_ratio to something higher. I think in most cases a vm.overcommit_memory=2 and vm.overcommit_ratio=1000 is saner than using vm.overcommit_memory=0.
The only reason this couldn't be a sane default is that on systems with 32MB a overcommit_ratio of 1000% is still too small (but still if you have 32MB and no swap, your probably still better off with this limit)