I mentioned the Thargoid respawning problem somewhere else, and I took the freedom of reducing the respawning probability, because the scenario was impossible to win (and not because I could get stuck). For me, winning means to kill all Thargoids and collect all surviving Thargons - that's how it could be done on the C64 version of Elite.
I didn't say it is impossible to survive if you can't jump out, but it should be very, very unlikely - unless there is some trick I don't know of and unless you fly some uber OXP battleship that outclasses even 10 Thargoids at once...
The core game lets you have 2 military lasers, an extra energy unit, shield boosters and a military shield enhancement. Fitted into a strong ship, you have reached kind of a limit. (I don't consider missiles and weapons of mass destruction. Missiles are relatively useless against Thargoids. The energy bomb did at least destroy the Thargons on the C64 version and will probably do this in Oolite too, but this weapon is very near cheating. But this doesn't matter much anyway, because the Thargoids keep respawning and you can't have an infinite number of these weapons.)
With a ship equipped as described, killing 2 or 3 Thargoids appearing together is not too difficult, even 4 and perhaps 5 (the maximum) should or could be possible with some practise and/or luck. But if you're done with them, your shields are probably at least partly down, your energy is low and your lasers are hot, and in this condition you must face the newly appearing fresh and healthy Thargoids. What makes things worse is that the second group usually appears, while you are still battling the first group! You can't regenerate while flying dodging maneuvers, because the Thargoids have turrets and keep hitting. And the number of Thargons keeps increasing...
This scenario was made more difficult at some point: cim mentionend
commit 242002. At this stage, exactly 1 Thargoid was added as soon the number had dropped below 2. That was probably survivable for an infinite time, but when I stumbled over the problem in the current version (1.82), there were 2-4 Thargoids added when the number dropped below 3! This is delayed by a random time, but it is impossible to kill 2 or more Thargoids and regenerate shields and energy in the average time you have before the respawning.
Theoretically it is of course possible to survive, because the respawning delay is random, but it is very unlikely, probably much more unlikely than getting stuck in witch space because of a malfunction. And you must have the luck of a long delay not only once but, on average, about 20 times before the trader appears!
One logical solution for the getting-stuck problem without needing to get fuel out of nowhere could be to extract fuel out of inactive Thargons. But this would require the scenario to be winnable with a realistic probability. Or to be able to scoop up living Thargons... I must admit that I never tried to do this.