About 20 years ago when I was programming early Macs, this kind of feature was used since the memory size was small and there was no swap file. I think it was called a "rainy day fund", or something else just as quaint.

A memory allocation error probably means that most likely (1) you've been leaking memory for a long time and you asked for a little bit more; (2) you passed in a garbage value (something huge) to the allocator; or (3) the heap is corrupt. With today's cavernous virtual memory, 1 is much less common and can usually be detected long before it happens so this feature wouldn't be useful there. 2 is probably pretty rare, but it might help there. With 3, it could even be dangerous to continue (e.g. unflushed open disk files) since you'll be touching the heap at least once and it's already bad.

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