> pretty much ~no user wants to kill a program after N seconds
This is exactly how the web and cloud FaaS like AWS Lambda does it, so I don't think it's right to say nobody wants this. Runaway code does need to be killed.
I didn't say nobody wants this, I said no user wants this. We're not talking web servers, we're talking about Windows desktop apps here... with humans using them. User != admin != owner. "Web and cloud FaaS like AWS Lambda" don't have "users" (i.e. the kind who would say "this shouldn't exhaust my system resources" like the parent did). They're cattle, running batch jobs, and/or serving APIs that other client applications invoke...