I don't count crawling to a halt as a working machine. Plus it depends. Back in the day I had computers that got blocked for 30-ish seconds which was annoying but gave you the window of opportunity to go kill the offending program. But then you had some that we left, out of curiosity, to work throughout the entire workday and they never recovered.

So most of the time I'd prefer option 3: the OOM killer to reap a few offending programs and let me handle restarting them.