Almost never is it a good idea to set the
page file size yourself. However, you might want to manually set the size of your page files if you desired them particularly distributed over several drives.
You might even cause more paging activity (disk writes) with an insufficiently sized page file, as Windows struggles to manage with it.
Unused RAM won't get paged out of there is nowhere to put it, causing excessive RAM use, impeding performance and caching.
And, as you have found, when you run out of virtual memory, Windows can't simply expand the page file when you have set it up a fixed size. No free memory can lead to app and/or system shutdown.
Worrying about SSD wear will drive you crazy, and modern SSDs do great at wear-leveling and cells have greater edurance than they used to. Do the math on a worst case load and you should find your SSD will last longer than you will ever need it to. I haven't ever had one fail or degrade in performance. It just isn't an issue.