I doubt the black plague functioned as a way to overcome resource limits. It slowed down growth, when there was plenty of room left. Now for the west as a whole this may have been a positive function. Neither were the crusades a way to overcome resource limits. The black plague's most "useful" result was embedding basic quarantine procedures, especially for ships, VERY deeply into the west's psyche, and it's only failed to prevent the spread of disease twice since the middle ages. The muslims, by contrast were devasted by disease 5 times in the second half of the 19th century, Europe only once, most muslim countries still have regular outbreaks of leprosy, polio, tyfus and tbc, even some of the richer ones, something which did not happen in the west for close to 250 years now.

You also seem to forget that other civilizations robbed other countries of resources too, yet it didn't save them. The mayans, the incas, the romans, the chinese and the mongols were good at this, just to name a few, and nothing surpasses the devastastation muslims wrought in africa in their search for slaves (the pre-oil "black gold") (not that anyone blames them : you see they killed every last black slave in their lands, so no-one blames them for anything, whereas America let slaves live and survive. Big mistake, apparently, or at least that's the message progressive "equal rights and equal outcome" idiots are giving off by exclusively blaming the ones who did not commit a racist massacre against their slave populations)

The point is that these methods were attempted by just about every civilization. Every one of them failed, except the west. It certainly wasn't for lack of conquests that these civilizations failed. Incas, Mongols and Chinese conquered areas much larger than the Europeans ever did, and it did not help them survive. The muslim ottoman theocratic empire, which conquered at least 40% of the globe (from the gold mines of south africa to hong kong was continuous ottoman territory at one point in time), yet such territorial and material advantages did not help them against the faster pace of innovation in the west.