Debugging what causes an OOM situation seems to be a wash with or without overcommit as an end user, I am guessing more warnings/hints would be appreciated by users and developers.

I use zram exclusively as swap, and while doing memory intensive tasks in the background, it's usually something interactive like the browser that ends up being killed. I would turn on swap that's isn't zram if this happened more often. I might also turn off overcommit if apps handled OOM situations gracefully, but as you say, the complexity might not be worth it.