good news: I figured out how to enable core dumps on osx. bad news: I immediately created a core dump so large that my machine ran out of disk and swap space

How did you do this?

1. set

ulimit -c

in the relevant shell, or in all shells 2.

sudo chmod 1777 /cores

(see https://stackoverflow.com/questions/58844265/mac-catalina-corefile-locations)