This is something you will not have to even think about on a healthy mac, as long as the hardware is not damaged in some way.

> Meanwhile, my OSX work laptop needs to be restarted multiple times a week, or the wifi gets temperamental and programs somehow start to accumulate and eat all the available CPU and RAM, it restarts itself periodically with zero warning (...) , and has had several kernel panics just this year, which are caused by OSX itself according to the dump.

Your mac has hardware problems -- ask for a new one, if possible.